Receiver Concept – Meanings and relationship with the issuer

We explain what the receiver is in communication and in other specific areas. Also, how is the relationship between sender and receiver.

receiver
The recipient can be an individual, organization, or part of a system.

What is a receiver?

We call any instance that fulfills the role of capturing, obtaining and usually interpreting or responding to some type of message, stimulus or information. The recipient can be an individual, organization, or part of a system. Its complementary figure is the issuer, which is the instance that originates and transmits the message in question.

The term receptor can be used in a myriad of different contexts and fields of knowledge, for example:

  • Sports: In baseball, one speaks of the pitcher and the receiver, the latter being the one who saves the thrown ball.
  • Biochemistry: Chemoreceptors in the brain are portions of the body that are sensitive to certain substances.
  • Telecommunications: Radio and television sets were formerly known as receivers.

Whatever the case, all these uses have in common the logic that the receivers, precisely, receive.

In the communicative act, the receiver is the one who hears, reads or captures in any way the message emitted by the sender, through a specific physical channel, and using a code (which must be common between sender and receiver, such as languages ) interprets it and obtains the ideas that it wanted to convey.

The communication circuit is completed when the broadcast message is received and understood. Then the sender and receiver usually exchange their places, in order to transmit a response.

Sender and receiver

The figure of the receiver, in its different areas, complements that of the sender. Without receivers, the messages transmitted by the senders would be lost in nothingness without reaching their destination, and there would be no communication possible. At the same time, without emitters, receivers would have nothing to receive.

On the other hand, depending on the communication model we are talking about, several simultaneous receivers can receive information from the same transmitter, as the radios of different neighbors pick up the same station simultaneously.

Instead, a receiver can typically be dedicated to only one sender at a time. Following the previous example, each neighbor will tune in to only one station at a time; So much so, that if the dial tunes two stations by mistake at the same time, it will be impossible for them to understand what has been said, obtaining only noise.