Swap Your Microwave for a High Voltage Stereo

When building a new project, common wisdom suggests to avoid “reinventing the wheel”, or doing something simple from scratch that’s easily available already. However, if you can build a high-voltage wheel, so to speak, it might be fun just to see what happens. [Dan] decided to reinvent not the wheel, …read more

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X-37B Spaceplane To Test Power Beaming Technology

Since 2010, the United States military has been operating a pair of small reusable spaceplanes that conduct secretive long-duration flights in low Earth orbit. Now officially operating under the auspices of the newly formed Space Force, the X-37Bs allow the military to conduct in-house research on new hardware and technology …read more

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“Quantum radar” uses entangled photons to detect objects

The weird world of quantum physics is being harnessed for some fascinating use cases. In the latest example, physicists have developed and demonstrated a “quantum radar” prototype that uses the quantum entanglement phenomenon to detect objects, a syste… Continue reading “Quantum radar” uses entangled photons to detect objects

Enforce Social Distancing with High Voltage

When getting parts together for a one-off project, we often find ourselves with some leftovers on hand. Most of the time these things go in the junk drawer, but [Brad] aka [AtomicZombie] was working on a project which required parts salvaged from several microwave ovens. That left him with enough …read more

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Teardown of Costco Ceiling Light Reveals Microwave Motion Sensor and Hackable Design

[hclxing] eagerly picked up an LED ceiling light for its ability to be turned on and off remotely, but it turns out that the lamp has quite a few other features. These include adjustable brightness, color temperature, automatic turnoff, light sensing, motion sensing, and more. Before installing, [hclxing] decided to …read more

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A Patch Antenna Is Just A Rectangle, It Should Be Easy To Design, Right?

If a grizzled RF engineer who bears the soldering-iron scars of a thousand projects could offer any advice, it would be that microwave antennas are not a field to be entered into lightly. Much heartache is to be saved by using an off-the-shelf design, and only the foolhardy venture willingly …read more

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5G is for Robots

Ecclesiastes 1:9 reads “What has been will be again, what has done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Or in other words, 5G is mostly marketing nonsense; like 4G, 3G, and 2G was before it. Let’s not forget LTE, 4G LTE, Advance 4G, and Edge. …read more

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Bouncing Signals Off The Moon

One of the great things about ham radio is that isn’t just one hobby. Some people like to chit chat, some like to work foreign countries, some prepare for emergencies, and there are several space-related activities. There are hundreds of different kinds of activities to choose from. Just one is …read more

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Bike-Mounted Synthetic-Aperture Radar Makes Detailed Images

Synthetic-aperture radar, in which a moving radar is used to simulate a very large antenna and obtain high-resolution images, is typically not the stuff of hobbyists. Nobody told that to [Henrik Forstén], though, and so we’ve got this bicycle-mounted synthetic-aperture radar project to marvel over as a result.

Neither the …read more

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A Doppler Radar Module From First Principles

If you’ve ever cast your eyes towards experimenting with microwave frequencies it’s likely that one of your first ports of call was a cheaply-available Doppler radar module. These devices usually operate in the 10 GHz band, and the older ones used a pair of die-cast waveguide cavities while the newer …read more

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