Transmission

Recently I reviewed the book "Starburst" [here].
Later I came back to talk about Gödelize Encoding that I learned about in that book. (here)

I never really got why it was a simplified transmission. I have a theory but it could be a load of crap. Feel free to jump in an point out the flaws in my thinking.

Lets start out with a basic radio wave.
This isn't what they actually look like. It's just the standard model to illustrate the concept of how they work. It's supposed to illustrate fluctuations of the electromagnetic field.
The waves have amplitude and frequency. The amplitude is the distance between the middle of the wave and the peak. The frequency is the distance between peaks.

AM radio stations fiddle with the amplitude of the wave. Thus AM means amplitude modulation.
FM radio stations fiddle with the frequency of the wave. Thus FM means frequency modulation.


The greater the distance from the point of transmission the greater the signal degrades. I don't just mean that it disperses and gets weaker. I'm talking primarily about static. Static is fluctuations caused by non-controlled sources. When you hear static you're listening to supernovae, pulsars, quasars, solar flares, vacuum cleaners, blenders, and even the electric windows on your car as they open and close. They add noise to the radio waves so they look more like this.

Which your radio interprets as something closer to this.
Those spikes make up the popping and hissing sounds. As long as the main signal is strong enough to overcome the popping and hissing signal you're in good shape. As the main signal fades... well, we've all driven out of range of our favorite radio station before. A big honking antenna would fix that. With a big enough dish antenna you might be able to pick out your favorite station on the moon. Or you might get every station on that side of the Earth that uses that frequency.

Now, a radio station needs a good dose of power to broadcast a long distance. The NPR station I listened to in college covered about 150 miles of Kansas flatland and it was a pretty powerful station at 100,000 watts. With a directional transmission they could have cut the power for the same distance, but only in one direction from the transmitter. A tight beam would cut the power even further but only people on a very specific path could get it. A spacecraft would be transmitting on a very tight beam back to Earth to get the most out of the power they're pumping into it. Even so, the further from Earth they get the weaker the signal and the more static we hear. The heroes of our story wanted to conserve power so they further enhanced things.

So, I'm thinking about why they used the numbers. What if instead of a curve they divided the wave into ten well defined energy levels? All the pops and noise outside of those levels would get filtered out. You could tolerate a lot more static before losing the signal completely.
Here I'm trying to show a curve with the ten energy levels, the curve squared off, zero through nine at set intervals, and then what the signal might look as when transmitting irregular numbers.

One could take it one step further and transmit in binary so there's only two states to worry about.


You could even go with a lower power setting.
Or, instead of alternating between (for example) 99.1 and 99.2 you just transmit at 99.1 and nothing. But I suppose that at high speeds the signal would be hard to differentiate from static.

Anyway, this is just me talking out of my educated, but non-professional, ass. Feel free to tell me so.