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Bluetooth is a new communication system for electrical devices in the home. Bluetooth is a wireless system that uses radio waves for communication. This straight away throws up plenty of advantages over the wired solutions that many of us use with our PC's. You may be correctly thinking that wireless technology has been around for a while., You will be right in that respect. Bluetooth however takes this a step further. Bluetooth has the ability to communicate with many different devices at once without interference. Bluetooth also has the ability to make its own connections to other devices. For example if you switch on your PC with a Bluetooth connection on it, the Bluetooth hub will send out a signal requesting that all other Bluetooth devices report back to it. Any Bluetooth devices will reply with its own signal. Between the two components they can decide if a connection between them is needed. If it is a wireless network is created between them, if not then no further communication is carried. This is to stop your Bluetooth PC from trying to communicate with your wireless telephone for example. As I mention Bluetooth is a wireless communication device. There are 2 main ways that electronic devices communicate without wires, one is Infra Red. This uses the Infra-Red part of the light spectrum to transmit light pulses to carry a signal. This is a digital format but is limited to devices that are in line of sight with each other. For example your remote control to your TV is an Infra-Red device. You will notice that unless you point it at your TV it will not work. This is because the signal is a beam of light and must make contact with the receiver directly. The second way is with Radio waves. This is the technology that Bluetooth uses. Bluetooth broadcasts its signal at a Radio frequency of 2.45 Gigahertz. Just like your radio receives a signal from the broadcasting station, Bluetooth sends and receives data via a radio signal. The real big advantage to way that Bluetooth operates is the fact that you the user don't have to think about working. With Infra red you will have to make sure that the devices are in line for example. With Bluetooth, all the devices once switched on search out each other and decide for themselves which of the devices need to talk to each other. It then sets up its own mini network. All this is done without any intervention from you at all. It is possible to have a completely wireless desktop with devices ranging from your keyboard and mouse to your headset and games controller all Bluetooth enabled and with no wires. Lets not forget that Bluetooth is not just for your PC. With a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone or PDA, you can keep everything synchronised without having to plug anything in anywhere. Think of it this way, with a mobile phone that has Bluetooth enabled you will be able have an address book that can easily be synchronised so your address and numbers are always up to date and be carried away from you. All you need is to be within range of the short range radio signal that the Bluetooth hub creates. The Standard range for Bluetooth is 10meters or 33 feet.
How can I use Bluetooth on
my PC? Using Bluetooth on your PC is easy, we have already gone through the basics on how Bluetooth communicates so now you need the practical features of Bluetooth. Basically put you will ultimately achieve a wireless desktop which makes working a lot easier. Plus with a 10 meter range you can be working with any components within a room or even the next room. A good example here would be a shared printer. You would be able to print to a printer on the other side of the room without having to have a long wire all the way round your room. The main communication wire currently on the PC is the USB cable. The way Bluetooth has been designed, its here to replace the USB cable. The idea is that any device that you normally connect to a USB port will be able to use the Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth however is not in direct competition with Wi-Fi wireless networking. This was designed to create a network of computers over a much wider distance. Avoiding problems with Bluetooth Just like everything else with Bluetooth, it has its own method of avoiding problems. Bluetooth as we know uses radio waves to communicate. Radio waves are all subject to the same problem, that is of course interference. Two types of interference may be present, the first is interference from other devices that use radio signals such as cordless phones. These operate around the same frequency as Bluetooth devices. By comparison though a Bluetooth device only sends out a signal with a very small amount of power about 1 milliwatt. Some mobile phones can send a signal with a power of up to 3 watts a massive difference. Because of this the Bluetooth device is easily recognised by electronic devices. This is also the reason why the range is limited to 10 meters. The second type of interference is from other Bluetooth devices. I'm sure some of you will of been wondering about this. The answer is within the little networks that the Bluetooth devices setup between themselves. The really clever bit involves the frequency in which the Bluetooth device sends its signals. I specified before that the frequency was 2.45 GHz, the specific figure is 2,400 to 2,483.5 MHz with 79 1Mhz channels to operate in. When a Bluetooth device is operating it hops between these channels 1600 times a second. because of this and the fact that other Bluetooth devices are doing the same, its extremely unlikely that a Bluetooth device will be on the same channel at the same time as another. Should this happen however, there is a software safeguard which allows for this type of error. Bear in mind that the error in the signal will not be great because if the two devices hot the same channel at the same time it will be for a maximum of 1/1600 of a second, which will not cause much data loss. Harald Bluetooth was king of Denmark in the late 900s. He managed to unite Denmark and part of Norway into a single kingdom then introduced Christianity into Denmark. He left a large monument, the Jelling rune stone, in memory of his parents. He was killed in 986 during a battle with his son, Svend Forkbeard. Choosing this name for the standard indicates how important companies from the Baltic region are to the communications industry, even if it says little about the way the technology works.
Bluetooth specifications
From the Bluetooth Website |
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