What is OFDM?

Wi-Fi and your favorite radio station both use OFDM to send messages through the air.

Imagine you're playing a game where you have to pass notes under your desk to your friend. If only one person is passing notes, it's easy, but if everyone in the class does it at once, things get messy and the notes can get mixed up or lost.

That’s like what happens with signals when they’re sent through the air. If all the messages are crammed together, they get jumbled, just like notes under a busy desk.

Now imagine instead of one person passing notes, you have several friends who each pass their own note, and everyone passes them at the same time, but on different paths. This way, even if some notes get mixed up, others still arrive clearly.

OFDM works like this: it breaks your message into smaller parts and sends them all together, each part taking a different channel, like different friends passing their own note, making sure everything arrives neatly at the other end.