In physics we often need to deal with quantities that are both very large and very small. If you look at the wavelengths for radio communications listed in Table 1 you can see that they vary over a wide range.
We cannot sensibly draw a graph with such a wide range of values using a linear scale. If we plot a simple graph of the wavelengths of some of these channels, the bars for the shorter wavelengths are too small to see because each division represents 20 m (Figure 1). But if we change the y-axis to a logarithmic scale, on which the values multiply by 10 for each division (Figure 2), then we can see that the wavelength for a remote car locking is 100 times the frequency used for a police speed radar.
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