if light and radio waves are all the same phenomenon, why cant my phone use one component as both the camera and the antenna?

Question

As above

In: Physics

Answer 1

Two big reasons:

1. Most people are mentioning that these have different energies and thus different wavelengths. An antenna must generally be physically the same size as the wavelengths it hopes to catch. Visible light wavelengths are smaller than a bacterium. 5g wavelengths are the width of a baseball.

2. The camera and antenna have vastly different designs for vastly different needs. The camera sensor is a big grid of individual sensors so that it can collect simultaneous signals from lots of different directions (each direction has 3 different color sensors, making up every single pixel). The antenna doesn’t need to be as precise about direction as the camera but it needs to be able to deal with a signal changing much more quickly!