Do you think sending a radio wave is a simple process of travel from point A to point B? But this isn’t always the case. Waves don’t always fly through the thin air straight from a transmitter to a receiver, and how they travel ultimately depends on what kind of wave frequency you want to send, and when. There are three ways this journey can happen, including:

Line of Sight (Space Wave)
With this method of travel, radio waves are sent as a simple beam of light from point A to point B. This method was commonly used in old-fashioned telephone networks that had to transmit calls over a long distance between two massive communication towers.

Ground Wave (Surface Wave)
You can also send radio waves along the curvature of the earth’s surface in the form of a ground wave. You’ll find AM radio waves traveling in this manner for short to medium distances, which is why you can still hear radio signals even when there isn’t a transmitter and receiver in your line of sight.

Ionosphere (Sky Wave)
Last, you can also send radio waves straight up into the sky, which ends up bouncing off of the earth’s ionosphere, which is an electrically charged part of the atmosphere. When you do this, the radio waves will hit the ionosphere, bounce back down to earth, and bounce back up again. This is the process of mirroring a wave, bouncing it back and forth to its final destination.

We have all three methods of travel a radio wave can take, via ground, space, or sky.

At this point we’ve gathered several things about radio waves, namely that they travel at very specific frequencies, they communicate with both a transmitter and receiver, and they can travel in a variety of ways across the earth.

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