Essential Guide to RF and Wireless, The

DECIBELS

Definition

If mathematicians had never come along, the story might stop right here and you would be an expert on loss and gain. Unfortunately, however, the signals leaving a transmitter can be literally a billion times larger than the signals arriving at the receiver, and the multiplication and division of such disparate numbers can be quite unruly. So mathematicians came up with a way of representing these big numbers with smaller numbers, which allows the use of addition and subtraction in place of multiplication and division. They call this little trick logarithms. (Or, as some people affectionately refer to them, those nasty little things which nobody understood in Algebra.) Before you panic and throw out the book, logarithms (or ...