Collaborate Disseminate
Our smartphones have become our constant companions over the last decade, and it’s often said that they have been such a success because they’ve absorbed the features of so many …read more Continue reading What’s Going To Happen To Legacy Broadcast Bands When The Lights Go Out?
An “Infinite Impedance Detector” might sound a little like something that [Zaphod Beeblebrox] would use to zip around the galaxy. It’s not, of course, but it is an interesting and …read more Continue reading JFET Stands in For Triode in This Infinite Impedance Detector
With music consumption having long ago moved to a streaming model in many parts of the world, it sometimes feels as though, just like the rotary telephone dial, kids might …read more Continue reading An Epic Tale Of Pirate Radio In Its Golden Age
Lightning is a powerful and seemingly mysterious force of nature, capable of releasing huge amounts of energy over relatively short times and striking almost at random. Lightning obeys the laws …read more Continue reading Detect Lightning Strikes with an Arduino
In a world with software-defined radios and single-chip receivers, a superheterodyne shortwave radio might not exactly score high on the pizzazz scale. After all, people have been mixing, filtering, and …read more Continue reading A Superheterodyne Receiver with a 74xx Twist
What attracts a lot of people to amateur radio is that it gives you the ability to make your own gear. Scratch-building hams usually start by making their own antennas, but eventually, the itch to build one’s own radio must …read more
Continue reading A One-Transistor Ham Transmitter Anyone Can Build
While we can’t argue that FM has superior audio quality and digital streaming allows even higher quality in addition to worldwide access, there’s still something magic about hearing a weak and fading AM signal from thousands of miles away with nothing between the broadcaster’s antenna and yours. If you can’t …read more
If you own a radio transmitter, from a $10 Baofeng handheld to a $1000 fancy all-band transceiver, setting the frequency is simply a case of dialing in where you want to go. A phase-locked-loop frequency synthesizer or a software-defined radio will generate your frequency, and away you go. There was …read more
There was a time when making a radio receiver involved significant work, much winding of coils, and tricky alignment of circuitry. The advent of Software Defined Radio (SDR) has moved a lot of this into the domain of software, but there is of course another field in which a radio …read more
Continue reading An FPGA And A Few Components Can Make A Radio
Terrestrial radio may be a dying medium, but there are still plenty of listeners out there. What would a commute to or from work be without a check of “Traffic on the Eights” to see if you need to alter your route, or an update of the scores from yesterday’s …read more
Continue reading A Dangerous Demonstration of the Power of Radio