remember when cell phones were the hot new thing and a big clunky phone with an
antenna that you had to pull out was the epitome of cool
you don't ah crap i'm getting really old aren't i
well anywho cell phones quickly started to
shrink in the late 1990s but many models
still had visible antennas of some sort
until the smartphone era came along getting us all used to sleek rectangular
devices without anything poking out at an odd angle that is until you have to
bust out a dongle but how exactly does a phone pick up a
signal without a visible antenna i mean as a 90s kid my knee-jerk response for a
long time to a reception issue whether it was on the phone the tv or the radio
was to pull the antenna out and start you know wiggling it around until the
problem went away so why don't we even have the option to
do that anymore one explanation you'll often hear has to
do with the frequencies used by modern cell phones you see an antenna typically
needs to be about one half to one quarter of the wavelength of the signal
that it's receiving in order to function properly and you can see this for
yourself if you've ever noticed a cb radio antenna attached to a car
because cb radios operate on a frequency where the wavelength is around 11 meters
the antennas can be comically long fortunately the wavelengths of typical
cellular frequencies are much shorter so depending on what kind of network you're
connected to your phone needs an antenna that's somewhere in the neighborhood of
around five to seven inches but then hold on a minute those older
phones also used frequencies in the 800
to 900 megahertz range so
it turns out that the main issue was figuring out how to stick a inch antenna
inside a device that's supposed to be handheld and this was harder than you
might think even though older phones were relatively
speaking so large just as the interiors of today's
smartphones are quite crowded with all the features that are packed inside
older phones also had tons of components taking up space within the chassis
as time went on though and consumer demand forever smaller phones increased
it became clear that this was a problem worth solving as otherwise reasonably
sized phones with large antennas sticking out of them were less portable
more fragile and if we're being honest just less sexy sorry i am that shallow
so the solution came in 1998 courtesy of a little company you might have heard of
called nokia instead of using a long metal rod they
stamped the antenna onto a component inside the phone in a thin flat layer
and not only that but this new antenna
was also printed with a number of folds and turns kind of like the traces on a
printed circuit board instead of in a straight line that meant it took up very
little space but was still long enough to receive a signal so this paradigm has
lasted into the modern age where thin metal antennas folded up inside phone
bodies are the norm and many phones even use part of the exterior metal of the
phone body itself as part of the antenna in fact having one end of the antenna be
a large flat sheet like the metal backing of a smartphone can give a
significant boost in bandwidth these physical innovations combined with
processing advances that make it easier for phones to work with a weaker signal
mean that there just isn't much reason to stick antennas way
on the outside of the main body anymore and in the somewhat near future faster
5g connections that use even higher frequency signals could mean that
antennas inside our phones would need to take up even less room
though if you're one of those folks that really misses the old school antennas i
do hear that boom boxes have been making a big comeback so
you should probably look into that
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