Portal:Telecommunication
The Telecommunication Portal
Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information with an immediacy comparable to face-to-face communication. As such, slow communications technologies like postal mail and pneumatic tubes are excluded from the definition. Many transmission media have been used for telecommunications throughout history, from smoke signals, beacons, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs to wires and empty space made to carry electromagnetic signals. These paths of transmission may be divided into communication channels for multiplexing, allowing for a single medium to transmit several concurrent communication sessions. Several methods of long-distance communication before the modern era used sounds like coded drumbeats, the blowing of horns, and whistles. Long-distance technologies invented during the 20th and 21st centuries generally use electric power, and include the telegraph, telephone, television, and radio.
Early telecommunication networks used metal wires as the medium for transmitting signals. These networks were used for telegraphy and telephony for many decades. In the first decade of the 20th century, a revolution in wireless communication began with breakthroughs including those made in radio communications by Guglielmo Marconi, who won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics. Other early pioneers in electrical and electronic telecommunications include co-inventors of the telegraph Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse, numerous inventors and developers of the telephone including Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell, inventors of radio Edwin Armstrong and Lee de Forest, as well as inventors of television like Vladimir K. Zworykin, John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth.
Since the 1960s, the proliferation of digital technologies has meant that voice communications have gradually been supplemented by data. The physical limitations of metallic media prompted the development of optical fibre. The Internet, a technology independent of any given medium, has provided global access to services for individual users and further reduced location and time limitations on communications. (Full article...)
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A satellite telephone, satellite phone or satphone is a type of mobile phone that connects to other phones or the telephone network by radio link through satellites orbiting the Earth instead of terrestrial cell sites, as cellphones do. Therefore, they can work in most geographic locations on the Earth's surface, as long as open sky and the line-of-sight between the phone and the satellite are provided. Depending on the architecture of a particular system, coverage may include the entire Earth or only specific regions. Satellite phones provide similar functionality to terrestrial mobile telephones; voice calling, text messaging, and low-bandwidth Internet access are supported through most systems. The advantage of a satellite phone is that it can be used in such regions where local terrestrial communication infrastructures, such as landline and cellular networks, are not available.
Satellite phones are popular on expeditions into remote locations where there is no reliable cellular service, such as recreational hiking, hunting, fishing, and boating trips, as well as for business purposes, such as mining locations and maritime shipping. Satellite phones rarely get disrupted by natural disasters on Earth or human actions such as war, so they have proven to be dependable communication tools in emergency and humanitarian situations, when the local communications system have been compromised. (Full article...)
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Philo Taylor Farnsworth (August 19, 1906 – March 11, 1971) was an American inventor and television pioneer. He made the critical contributions to electronic television that made possible all the video in the world today. He is best known for his 1927 invention of the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device (video camera tube), the image dissector, as well as the first fully functional and complete all-electronic television system. Farnsworth developed a television system complete with receiver and camera—which he produced commercially through the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation from 1938 to 1951, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
In later life, Farnsworth invented a small nuclear fusion device, the Farnsworth Fusor, employing inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC). Like many fusion devices, it was not a practical device for generating nuclear power, although it provides a viable source of neutrons. The design of this device has been the inspiration for other fusion approaches, including the Polywell reactor concept. Farnsworth held 300 patents, mostly in radio and television. (Full article...)
Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that when journalist Bill Fleischman was surprised by a radio advertisement about his next-day article, he just sat down and wrote it?
- ... that just four years after starting up, the president of Satellite Television & Associated Resources commented that his entire industry had "gone down the drain"?
- ... that employees claimed to have temporarily shut down an Arkansas radio station over not receiving paychecks?
- ... that the 40-foot radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory was the first automated telescope?
- ... that country music singer Waylon Jennings earned his GED by watching tapes of a Kentucky Educational Television series on his tour bus?
- ... that Gwent Broadcasting, at the time the smallest Independent Local Radio station in Britain, lasted less than two years?
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