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What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Artist Nickolay Lamm, a blogger for MyDeals.com, decided to shed some light on the subject. He created visualizations that imagine the size, shape, and color of wi-fi signals were they visible to the human eye. 'I feel that by showing what wi-fi would look like if we could see it, we'd appreciate the technology that we use everyday,' Lamm told me in an email. 'A lot of us use technology without appreciating the complexity behind making it work.'"
The graphic shows 2 perpendicular waves centered on the transmission axis. I understand he's trying to depict the I and Q components of a signal, but it's just a singular, corkscrew waveform in real life that we cannot easily map from 3D to 2D in most educational graphics on the subject. Some of the fancier radio chains compute the jQ component because the Nyquist frequency of the ADC in the baseband receiver only has to equal the frequency of your baseband instead of 2x the baseband frequency when you're only sampling the I component.
This is just nitpicking, but the wavelengths are HUGE. I understand that it's impossible to depict a wavelength in nanometers without resorting to showing a fuzzy cloud and saying that there's not enough pixels to show the discreet waveforms. tom17 is dead right when he says it would look like light, because all the scattering and reflection and refraction occurs with visible EMF as well as radio.