How many bits does it take to express the information included in one trit? We now turn to a transmitter, a piece of hardware that can transmit data over a communications line (a channel). In practice, such a transmitter sends binary data (a modem is a good example). However, in order to obtain general results, we assume that the data is a string made up of occurrences of the n symbols a1 through an. Such a set is an n-symbol alphabet. Since there are n symbols, we can think of each as a base-n digit, which means that it is equivalent to n bits. As far as the hardware is concerned, this means that it must be able to transmit at n discrete levels.