Megahertz (MHz)
One million hertz. FM radio and older processors.
1 megahertz = 1,000,000 hertz (exactly).
About the megahertz
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.
Sources: Wikipedia: Megahertz; Wikipedia: FM broadcast band
Megahertz conversion chart
1 megahertz expressed in every other frequency unit:
| Unit | 1 megahertz |
|---|---|
| Hertz | 1,000,000 |
| Kilohertz | 1,000 |
| Gigahertz | 0.001 |
| Revolutions Per Minute | 60,000,000 |
| Beats Per Minute | 60,000,000 |
| Terahertz | 0.000001 |
| Millihertz | 1,000,000,000 |
| Radians Per Second | 6,283,185.307 |
| Degrees Per Second | 360,000,000 |
More Metric (SI) units
- hertz (frequency)
- kilohertz (frequency)
- gigahertz (frequency)
- terahertz (frequency)
- millihertz (frequency)
- revolution per minute (frequency)
- beat per minute (frequency)
- meter (length)
- kilometer (length)
- centimeter (length)
- millimeter (length)
- micrometer (length)
- nanometer (length)
- picometer (length)
- decimeter (length)
- hectometer (length)
Browse all frequency units.