My daughter is actually 5 and is starting to ask questions I don’t have great ways of explaining to a 5 year old.
Today she asked me how my car gets satellite signals, after I told her what satellites are. I’m less interested in orbits – this thread does a great job explaining that – [https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60uuxk/eli5_how_do_space_satellites_work/](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60uuxk/eli5_how_do_space_satellites_work/)
This is more like how can I explain to her the concept of the physics of signals at her age? What is a signal to a 5 year old?
I’ve read a lot of really cool stuff about how GPS works by triangulating etc. But I’m trying to go one basic layer deeper than that. What is the “signal” made of? For a 5 yr old.
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Satellites for uses like positioning, radio and the likes have radio transmitters on them. They work based on the same principle as a Wi-Fi access point, a cellular phone tower or, if you consider that the “consumer” part of GPS only sends data from the satellite to the receiver on the ground, maybe a FM radio transmitter is a better analogy. The signal is made of electromagnetic waves, modulated in a way to contain the needed information. This is achieved by basically creating an electrical waveform on a circuit board in the satellite and feeding it to an antenna, which will then emit that same waveform into the void of the space towards the Earth’s surface. In your navigation device, another antenna will then “read” that electromagnetic wave, that has become very weak because it has traveled so far, into an electric signal that is then processed to extract the information.
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