Hertz to Megahertz (Hz to MHz)

1 hertz equals 0.000001 megahertz exactly.

How to convert hertz to megahertz

To convert hertz to megahertz, multiply the number of hertz by 0.000001. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply megahertz by 1,000,000.

megahertz = hertz × 0.000001

Example: 10 hertz = 0.00001 megahertz.

About these units

Hertz (Hz)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI unit of frequency: one cycle per second. Named after Heinrich Hertz.

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857 to 1894) was a German physicist who, in experiments between 1886 and 1889, produced and detected radio waves with a spark-gap transmitter and a loop receiver. He showed that they travel at the speed of light and can be polarised, reflected and refracted, confirming Maxwell's theory. Asked about uses for them, he is said to have replied, Nothing, I guess. The International Electrotechnical Commission established the name hertz in 1935, and the CGPM adopted it in 1960, replacing cycles per second.

One hertz is one cycle per second, equal to s to the minus one. A clock ticking once a second runs at 1 Hz, a human heart at rest beats at around 1.2 Hz, and young ears hear roughly 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. The SI treats cycle itself as not a unit, and the hertz applies only to periodic events, whereas the becquerel counts random radioactive decays, even though both are one per second. The second is now defined by fixing the caesium frequency at exactly 9,192,631,770 hertz.

The hertz is the reference unit for frequency on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Hertz; Wikipedia: Heinrich Hertz; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition

Megahertz (MHz)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One million hertz. FM radio and older processors.

Engineers once said megacycles, and the older unit shows up in postwar papers, one 1946 study on ultrasound in liquids being titled with 15 megacycles. When hertz replaced cycles per second, the megacycle per second, Mc/s, became the megahertz. The word then entered home computing: Wikipedia notes personal computer clock speeds of around 1 MHz in the late 1970s on machines from Atari, Commodore and Apple.

A megahertz is one million hertz, the natural scale of broadcast radio. FM stations in most of the world use 87.5 to 108 MHz, with the Americas using 88 to 108 MHz and Japan using 76 to 95 MHz. In North America channels are spaced 200 kHz apart, and the FCC reassigned FM to its present band in 1945. As a way to rate computers, clock speed is criticised by many experts, who call it an easily manipulable benchmark because some chips need several cycles per operation and others perform several operations in one.

1 megahertz = 1,000,000 hertz (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Megahertz; Wikipedia: FM broadcast band

Related conversions

See all frequency units.