Why do empty radio frequency make that sound instead of just being completely silent?
In: Technology
* For analog radio equipment, it’s difficult to know when a signal is a legitimate broadcast or just background noise.
* Also, with analog radio broadcasts, a signal could be very faint and yet still have listenable qualities, so radios don’t blank out channels even if they detect mostly noise because the user might still want to listen.
* With digital broadcasts, there is identifying information in the broadcast data that tells the radio this is a station.
* Without that data, the radio knows it’s just background noise.
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