
It is amazing to know that when you turn on your television to watch a live news broadcast, you are looking at a moving image that is happening in real time although the newscaster is hundreds of miles away. How does your TV do this? Well, it is actually picking up radio signals received from the aerial on the roof of your house.
To understand how your aerial works, we should first know how radio waves are produced. Let us say a TV station wants to broadcast some live news. The images and sounds that the crew's cameras and microphones capture are converted into electrical energy by various equipment. The electrical signal flows through a huge metal antenna tower called a transmitter, which is usually hundreds of feet high. Because this signal is very weak, it needs to be intensified tremendously with the help of signal amplifiers. The electrons in the now-powerful electrical signal vibrates back and forth along the antenna's structure, creating invisible electromagnetic radiation called radio waves, which travel outward from the transmitter at the speed of light.
When you turn on your television, your aerial picks up the radio waves sent by the television station. As the radio waves hit the metal of your aerial, the electrons in the material will vibrate, generating a weak electrical signal. The signal travels through your TV's various systems to be interpreted and converted to video and sounds, which you can now see and hear. Sometimes, the signal feed is not clear. That is because the radio waves from the transmitter is blocked by something. In this case, you need to adjust your antenna's position to get the clearest signal.