They have been doing this with sound for some time. Radio is just faster. (Yes, I know that is WAY oversimplified). At radio frequencies, any electrical engineer will tell you there is no such thing as digital. The edge of a square wave is not perfectly straight. It is a noisy curve based on the impedance of the circuit and the current used to drive the transition. There is inductance and capacitance in every conveyance of electricity. In a "clean" circuit, the effect of this parasitic L/C is either negligible or compensated for.
A radio antenna is, by definition, an analog part which electrically resembles a coil with some capacitance . So even the title misleading. The fact that they can us algorithms to control the digital signal in such a way that the antenna will smooth it out into a radio wave is kind of cool, but it isn't a crazy breakthrough. You can see almost every computer on a spectrum analyzer as radio wave source. This is just a neat trick, like getting the line printer to sound like music by sending the right stuff to print.
sigh, boring (Score:2)
They have been doing this with sound for some time. Radio is just faster. (Yes, I know that is WAY oversimplified). At radio frequencies, any electrical engineer will tell you there is no such thing as digital. The edge of a square wave is not perfectly straight. It is a noisy curve based on the impedance of the circuit and the current used to drive the transition. There is inductance and capacitance in every conveyance of electricity. In a "clean" circuit, the effect of this parasitic L/C is either negligible or compensated for.
A radio antenna is, by definition, an analog part which electrically resembles a coil with some capacitance . So even the title misleading. The fact that they can us algorithms to control the digital signal in such a way that the antenna will smooth it out into a radio wave is kind of cool, but it isn't a crazy breakthrough. You can see almost every computer on a spectrum analyzer as radio wave source. This is just a neat trick, like getting the line printer to sound like music by sending the right stuff to print.