ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Bandstacked

Have you ever heard of a radio? It's a machine that can play music or talk from far away. It works by picking up signals that are sent through the air, and then turning those signals into sounds we can hear.

Now, imagine that there are many different signals being sent through the air at the same time, like different people talking to each other in a big crowd. These signals are sent on different frequencies, which is like different channels on a TV.

Bandstacking is a way to listen to more than one signal at the same time on a radio. It's like having multiple radios tuned to different stations playing at the same time. This technique is often used by radio operators or hams who want to listen to multiple conversations or broadcasts all at once.

To bandstack, someone might use something called a "multiband receiver." This is a fancy kind of radio that can pick up signals on many different frequencies at once. The signals are all combined together, like mixing different colors of paint, so that it sounds like one big jumble of noise.

But with some skill and practice, a person can learn to pick out and understand each individual signal in the jumble, like hearing different voices in a noisy room. By bandstacking, radio operators can keep up with many different conversations or even listen to radio stations from different countries all at once. Pretty cool, huh?