How does FDM transmit multiple signals across a single conductor such as coaxial cable simultaneously?
In: Engineering
Imagine a big slide at a playground. If you have a lot of kids who want to go down the slide, they can all take turns, but it would take a while.
Now, think of FDM like giving each kid their own special slide that runs next to the big slide. Each kid can go down at the same time without bumping into each other because they’re on different slides.
In a coaxial cable, FDM uses different “slides” or frequencies for each signal. Just like the kids, each signal gets its own frequency to travel on, so they can all move together without interfering. This way, lots of information can go through the same cable at the same time!
It’s very similar to how multiple radio stations can all be transmitting at once yet you can listen to one at a time. Each signal is on a different channel, consisting of a range of frequencies. At the receiving end you tune into that range and exclude the others to extract a single signal.
As long as there is enough separation between two different signals channel (i.e. the frequencies they use are far enough apart) they won’t interfere. If you looked at all the signals at once, it would look like noise, but if you use a filter to allow only one channel’s frequencies, you can pull out just that one signal from the rest.
Think of it like hitting multiple keys on the piano at the same time. The conductor – the air – hosts multiple frequencies simultaneously in a complex waveform. By tuning some receiver to only receive a narrow band of frequencies, we could extract out when a specific key is being played.
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