How OFDM works

First of all the FDM part - Frequency division multiplexing is a technology that transmits several signals at the same time over a single transmission path, in a medium such as a cable or wireless system. Each signal is transmitted inside its own unique frequency range (the carrier frequency), which is then modulated by the data that is needing to be transmitted.

Orthogonal FDM's spread spectrum technique spreads the data over a lot of carriers that are spaced apart at precise frequencies. This spacing provides the "orthogonality" in this method which prevents the receivers/demodulators from seeing frequencies other than their own specific one. The main benefit of OFDM is high spectral efficiency, but with OFDM you also get; high resiliency to RF interference, and the multi-path distortion is lower. This is handy because in a standard terrestrial broadcasting situation there are high amounts of multipath-channels (e.g. the signal that was sent arrives at the receiving end using multiple paths of different lengths). Since the various versions of the signal interfere with each other, known as inter symbol interference (ISI) it becomes incredibly hard to extract the original information.

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