Path loss

Path loss is like when you go outside to play and you want to talk to your friends who are far away from you. When you talk to them, your voice gets weaker and quieter the further away they are. That's because some of the sound waves from your voice get absorbed or scattered by things in the environment like trees, buildings, and hills. This makes your voice harder to hear, and your friends might not be able to hear you at all if you're too far away.

In electronics, this is called path loss. When you send a signal, like a phone call or a Wi-Fi signal, it spreads out in all directions like ripples in a pond. As the signal gets further away from the source, it gets weaker and weaker. Path loss is the measure of this weakening effect on the signal due to the distance and obstacles it has to travel through.

Just like with your voice outside, the signal can get absorbed or scattered by things in the environment. It can also be affected by things like the frequency of the signal, the transmitter power and receiver sensitivity, and the type of antenna used.

Path loss is an important concept to understand, especially for engineers who design and optimize wireless communication systems. By knowing how much path loss is expected for a given environment, they can design systems with enough transmitter power, receiver sensitivity, and antenna gain to make sure the signal reaches its intended destination.