I am a new radio ham with general license and is trying to dive into antenna theory. As the question suggests, I want to know more about fourier transform. With all the resources I can find on the internet, no one seemed to be able to explain it in layman’s terms without showing shitty formulas that I don’t understand. I would like someone to explain fourier transform with little math as possible, or teach me any math concepts involved.
What is fourier transform? How does it work? How is the formulas derived? What are its appliations in communication antennas?
In: Engineering
Suppose I had some sheet music that specified the some notes and volumes of those notes, and played it on a piano, it would obviously produce a sound. A Fourier Transform essentially does the opposite, it takes a sound, and breaks it down into the notes that make up the sound.
Edit: Sound is made up of waves, and there are a bunch of ways to organize the sound waves, but the simplest way mathematically to do that is based on the frequency, and to plug that frequency into a complex exponential (or a sine and cosine). So if you look at the formula’s for Fourier Transforms, you’ll see those guys cropping up. The derivation of the fourier transform is essentially a generalization of the dot product from early vector math, but instead of seeing how well two vectors line up with each other, you see how well two functions do so.
Latest Answers