The way to get into radio, and thence electronics, in the middle years of the last century, was to fire up a shortwave receiver and tune across the bands. In the days when every country worth its salt had a shortwave station, Cold War adversaries boomed propaganda across the airwaves, and even radio amateurs used […]
In these days of everything-streaming, it’s great to see an old school radio build. It’s even better when it’s not old-school at all, but packed full of modern ICs and driven by a micro-controller like the dsPIC in [Minh Danh]’s dsMP3 build. Best of all is when we get enough details that the author needs […]
Shortwave radio has a charm all its own: part history, part mystery, and a whole lot of tech nostalgia. The Hallicrafters S-53A is a prime example of mid-century engineering, but when you get your hands on one, chances are it won’t be in mint condition. Which was exactly the case for this restoration project by […]
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, […]
The true story of pirate radio is a complicated fight over the airwaves. Maybe you have a picture in your mind of some kid in his mom’s basement playing records, but the pirate stations we are thinking about — Radio Caroline and Radio Northsea International — were major business operations. They were perfectly ordinary radio […]
When you think of a software defined radio (SDR) setup, maybe you imagine an IC or two, maybe feeding a computer. You probably don’t think of a vacuum tube. [Mirko Pavleski] built a one-tube shortwave SDR using some instructions from [Burkhard Kainka] which are in German, but Google Translate is good enough if you want […]