Making a multi-band amateur radio transceiver has always been a somewhat challenging project, and making one that also supported different modes would for many years have been of almost impossible complexity best reserved for expensive commercial projects. [Bob W7PUA] has tackled both in the form of a portable 10-band multi-mode unit, and we can honestly […]
We hear a lot about how ham radio isn’t what it used to be. But what was it like? Well, the ARRL’s film “The Ham’s Wide World” shows a snapshot of the radio hobby in the 1960s, which you can watch below. The narrator is no other than the famous ham [Arthur Godfrey] and also […]
LoRa gear can be great for doing radio communications in a light-weight and low-power way. However, it can also work over great distances if you have the right hardware—and the right antennas in particular. [taste_the_code] has been experimenting in this regard, and whipped up a simple yagi antenna that can work at distances of up […]
Unless you work for the government or a large corporation, constrained designs are a fact of life. No matter what you’re building, there’s likely going to be a limit to the time, money, space, or materials you can work with. That’s good news, though, because constrained projects tend to be interesting projects, like this airborne […]
The Tiny Tapeout custom ASIC project has been around for a while now, and has passed through several iterations of its production. On each Tiny Tapeout chip are multiple designs, each representing an individual project, and in use the chip is configured to present that project to its pins. Given enough Tiny Tapeout chips it […]
When the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was put into orbit around Earth, anyone in the path of the satellite could receive the beeps transmitted by the satellite provided they had some simple radio equipment. Of course, there was no two-way communication with this satellite, and it only lasted a few weeks before its batteries died. […]
Guanella Impedance Transformer. (Credit: FesZ Electronics) Even before entering the mystical realms of UHF design, radio frequency (RF) circuits come with a whole range of fun design aspects as well. A case in point can be found in transmission line transformers, which are commonly used in RF power amplifiers, with the Guanella transformer (balun) being […]
[Stephen] recently wrote in to share his experiments with using the LimeSDR mini to conduct a bit of piracy on the airwaves, and though we can’t immediately think of a legitimate application for spamming the full FM broadcast band simultaneously, we can’t help but be fascinated by the technique. Called the Taylorator, as it was […]
The chances are that many of you will have made an FM “bug” style transmitter, a simple one-transistor oscillator usually driven by a small electret microphone. It’s also relatively straightforward to do the same for AM, and if you take a look through AliExpress you’ll find some modules which do just that. [Doz Television Workshop] […]
Not too far away from where this is being written is one of Uncle Sam’s NATO outposts, a satellite earth station for their comms system. Its most prominent feature is a radome, a huge golf-ball-like structure visible for miles, that protects a large parabolic antenna from the British weather. It makes sense not just for […]