How hard is it to make a fully standalone SDR? [101 Things] shows you how to take a breadboard, a PI Pico, and two unremarkable chips to create a capable radio. You can see the whole thing in the video below. The design uses a standard Tayloe demodulator. There’s also an encoder and an OLED […]
The decline of AM broadcast radio is a slow but inexorable process over much of the world, but for regions outside America there’s another parallel story happening a few hundred kilohertz further down the spectrum. The long wave band sits around the 200kHz mark and has traditionally carried national-level programming due to its increased range. […]
The QN8066 is a fun little FM transmitter chip. It covers the full FM broadcast band and has built-in DSP. You would find this sort of part in car cell phone adapters before every vehicle included Bluetooth or an AUX port. [Ricardo] has created an Arduino library to bring the QN8066 to the masses. The […]
Anyone who has done an electronic engineering qualification will at some point have had to get to grips with transmission lines, and then if they are really lucky, waveguides. Perhaps there should be one of those immutable Laws stating that for each step in learning about these essential parts, the level of the maths you […]
The classic crystal radio was an oatmeal box with some wire and a few parts. [Michael Simpson] has something very different. He found an assembled Philmore “selective” radio kit. The simple kit had a coil, a germanium diode, and a crystal earphone. We were sad when [Michael] accidentally burned a part of the radio’s coil. […]
It is one of Murphy’s laws, we think, that you can’t get great things when you need them. Back in the heyday of shortwave broadcasting, any of us would have given a week’s pay for even a low-end receiver today. Digital display? Memory? Digital filtering? These days, you have radios, and they aren’t terribly expensive, […]
We’ve frequently talked about amateur radio on these pages, both in terms of the breadth of the hobby and the surprisingly low barrier to entry. It’s certainly the case that amateur radio does not have to mean endlessly calling CQ on SSB with an eye-wateringly expensive rig, and [Bill Meara N2CQR] is on hand with […]
When [PeterSripol] was a kid, he made a simple sailboat from a scrap piece of 2×4 and some napkin sails. He’s not 8 years old anymore, but he decided he wanted to make another 2X4 sailboat using the skills he’s learned since he was a kid. You’ll have to get past storytime and mice, but […]
If your neighborhood is anything like ours, walking across the street is like taking your life in your own hands. Drivers are increasingly unconcerned by such trivialities as speed limits or staying under control, and anything goes when they need to connect Point A to Point B in the least amount of time possible. Monitoring […]
[David Schneider] asked himself, “How big a radio antenna would you need to observe anything interesting?” The answer turns out to be a $150 build of a half meter antenna. He uses it to detect the motions of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The first attempt was a satellite TV dish and a […]