How do you know that your patch cables are good? For simple jumper wires, a multimeter is about all you need to know for sure. But things can get weird in the RF world, in which case you might want to keep these coaxial patch cable testing tips in mind. Of course, no matter how […]
In the quest for an accurate frequency standard there are many options depending on your budget, but one of the most affordable is an oven controlled crystal oscillator (OCXO). [RF Burns] has a video looking at one of the cheapest of these, a sub ten dollar AliExpress module. A crystal oven is a simple enough […]
There’s a paradox in amateur radio: after all the time and effort spent getting a license and all the expense of getting some gear together, some new hams suddenly find that they don’t have a lot to talk about when they get in front of the mic. While that can be awkward, it’s not a […]
Although ham radio can be an engaging, rewarding hobby, it does have a certain reputation for being popular among those who would fit in well at gated Florida communities where the preferred mode of transportation is the golf cart. For radio manufacturers this can be a boon, as this group tends to have a lot […]
The Proxmark3 PCB 125kHz antenna., GNU GPL version 2, GitHub link. Picture this: It’s the end of the year, and a few hardy souls gather in a hackerspace to enjoy a bit of seasonal food and hang out. Conversation turns to the Flipper Zero, and aspects of its design, and one of the parts we […]
If there’s anything more annoying to an amateur radio operator than noise, we’re not sure what it could be. We’re talking about radio frequency noise, of course, the random broadband emissions that threaten to make it almost impossible to work the bands and pick out weak signals. This man-made interference is known as “QRM” in […]
Many things have combined to make very high-frequency RF gear much more common, cheaper, and better performing. Case in point: [dereksgc] is tearing apart a 20 GHz low-noise block (LNB). An LNB is a downconverter, and this one is used for some Irish satellite TV services. The scale of everything matters when your wavelength is […]
Alfred Vail (public domain) We talk about Morse code, named after its inventor, Samuel Morse. However, maybe we should call it Vail code after Alfred Vail, who may be its real inventor. Haven’t heard of him? You aren’t alone. Yet he was behind the first telegraph key and improved other parts of the fledgling telegraph […]
Ham radio enthusiasts, people looking to borrow their neighbors’ WiFi, and those interested in decoding signals from things like weather satellites will often grab an old satellite TV antenna and repurpose it. Customers have been leaving these services for years, so they’re pretty widely available. But for handheld operation, these metal dishes can get quite […]
Do you remember the fourth-place winner in the 2022 Hackaday Prize? If it’s slipped your mind, that’s okay—it was Boondock Echo. It was a radio project that aimed to make it easy to record and playback conversations from two-way radio communications. The project was entered via Hackaday.io, the judges dug it, and it was one […]