What is RF?
RF refers to radio frequency, the mode of communication for wireless technologies of all kinds, including cordless phones, radar, ham radio, GPS, and radio and television broadcasts. RF technology is so much a part of our lives we scarcely notice it for its ubiquity. From baby monitors to cell phones, Bluetooth® to remote control toys, RF waves are all around us. RF waves are electromagnetic waves which propagate at the speed of light, or 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/s). The frequencies of RF waves, however, are slower than those of visible light, making RF waves invisible to the human eye. The frequency of a wave is determined by its oscillations or cycles per second. One cycle is one hertz (Hz); 1,000 cycles is 1 kilohertz (KHz); 1 million cycles is 1 megahertz (MHz); and 1 billion cycles is 1 gigahertz (GHz). A station on the AM dial at 980, for example, broadcasts using a signal that oscillates 980,000 times per second, or has a frequency of 980 KHz. A station a little furt
RF itself has become synonymous with wireless and high-frequency signals, describing anything from AM radio between 535 kHz and 1605 kHz to computer local area networks (LANs) at 2.4 GHz. However, RF has traditionally defined frequencies from a few kHz to roughly 1 GHz. If one considers microwave frequencies as RF, this range extends to 300 GHz. The following two tables outline the various nomenclatures for the frequency bands. The third table outlines some of the applications at each of the various frequency bands.
