Introduction to Radio Frequency

RF stands for Radio Frequency, is a very tricky yet interesting arena. RF is actually an electromagnetic wave or radio waves transmitted over a medium as a communication or broadcasting link. General RF applications that can be witnessed are Television video transmission, Radio communication and Mobile phones. All the applications uses specific frequencies or fall under some frequency bands, which is governed by a regulatory body. Frequencies that carries the unit Hertz (Hz) is a change in state or cycle in an alternating waves per second. Frequencies are generally seen stated as kHz, Mhz, GHz and so on.

Radio regulation is done both locally ( such as MCMC in Malaysia ) and globally ( such as FCC ). The reason for such regulation is due to certain technical aspects, safety and commercial applications that needs to be adhered to. Such body would provide standard regulation that needs compliance for certification. Failing to do so would deem a product illegal. A simple example for this would be to look into inteference issue in RF. In Malaysia, the band 900Mhz are being used by mobile service operators. If other products that uses 900Mhz are allowed into Malaysia and commercially used, this may interrupt the service of this 900Mhz mobile operators. However simple it may sound, there are various technical aspects that needs to be looked into in order to say a product is interfering, which is beyond the scope of this introduction page.

On the complication side, radio links which are controlled by frequencies tend to have a direct proportion to distance. Inteference, fading, reflection, absorbtion, penetration are just some of the factors that needs to be looked into. When done professionally, a study would be conducted, such as a link budget study, to ensure suitable signal is received.

SIXUS has great expertise in the RF fields, with consultants directly involved in the planning and operation of RF application such as satellite transmission, GSM, point to point microwave links, Wifi on the ISM band, radio modems and many others.