Advantages and Applications of Microwaves

Microwaves are the electromagnetic or radio waves having higher frequencies of order GHz. Microwaves Technology have many Applications in our daily life. Microwaves have many advantages over general radio waves. General Radio waves have low frequencies while Microwaves are Waves having frequencies laying in SHF i.e. Super High Frequency Band. Due to higher frequencies, Microwaves have advantages like larger bandwidth and higher data rates. Some of the Advantages of Microwaves are described below.
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Advantages of Microwaves

Large Bandwidth: The Bandwidth of Microwaves is larger than the common low frequency radio waves. Thus more information can be transmitted using Microwaves. It is very good advantage, because of this, Microwaves are used for Point to Point Communications.
Better Directivity: At Microwave Frequencies, there are better directive properties. This is due to the relation that As Frequency Increases, Wavelength decreases and as Wavelength decreases Directivity Increases and Beam width decreases. So it is easier to design and fabricate high gain antenna in Microwaves.
Small Size Antenna: Microwaves allows to decrease the size of antenna. The antenna size can be smaller as the size of antenna is inversely proportional to the transmitted frequency. Thus in Microwaves, we have waves of much higher frequencies and hence the higher the frequency, the smaller the size of antenna.
Low Power Consumption:The power required to transmit a high frequency signal is lesser than the power required in transmission of low frequency signals. As Microwaves have high frequency thus requires very less  power.
Effect Of Fading: The effect of fading is minimized by using Line Of Sight propagation technique at Microwave Frequencies. While at low frequency signals, the layers around the earth causes fading of the signal.
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Applications of Microwaves

There are many Industrial, Scientific, Medical and Domestic Applications of Microwaves. The great example of Application of Microwaves is 'Microwave Oven' which we uses in our daily life. Following are the other main application areas of Microwaves:
Communication:Microwave is used in broadcasting and telecommunication transmissions. As described above, they have shorter wavelengths and allows to use smaller antennas. The cellular networks like GSM, also uses Microwave frequencies of range 1.8 to 1.9 GHz for communication. Microwaves are also used for transmitting and receiving a signal from earth to satellite and from satellite to earth. Military or Army also makes use of Microwaves in their communication system. They uses X or Ku band for their communication.
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Remote Sensing: Most of you may be familiar with this Application. The most common application of Microwave is its use in RADAR and SONAR. RADAR is used to illuminate an object by using a transmitter and receiver to detect its position and velocity. Radiometry  is also one of the Remote Sensing Applications.
Heating: You all are familiar with this application. We uses Microwave Oven to bake and cook food. It is very convenient electronic machine which performs the heating task very cleanly and in a very less time. If you Want to know How Does a Microwave Works? then you may wonder that is based on the vibration of electrons present in the Food Particles. That is why Microwave Oven heats the food uniformly without heating the container.
Medical Science: Microwave's heating properties are also used in Medical Science. Microwave also have Medical Applications such as it is used in diagnosis and various therapies. There are also some other applications of heating property of microwave such as Drying, Precooking and Moisture Leveling.