Collaborate Disseminate
If there’s one instrument that hams and other radio enthusiasts covet, it’s the venerable Bird 43 Thruline wattmeter. The useful RF tool has barely changed in the nearly 70 years …read more Continue reading Homebrew Wattmeter Pays Homage to Sturdy Original
Our Hackaday team is spread across the world, but remains in easy contact through the magic of the Internet. A number of us hold amateur radio callsigns, so could with …read more Continue reading Building A Hundred-Year-Old Radio Transmitter
Artificially constrained designs can be among the most challenging projects to build, and the most interesting to consider. The amateur radio world is no stranger to this, with homebrew radio designs that set some sort of line in the sand. …read more
Continue reading Getting On the Air With a 10-Minute-ish Ham Transmitter
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
Most hobby-grade software defined radio setups don’t transmit. Of the few that do, most of them put out anemic levels around one milliwatt or so. If you want to do something outside of the lab, you’ll need an amplifier and that’s what [Tech Minds] shows how to do in a …read more
While [Selim Olcer] was relatively happy with his Kenwood TM-D710a radio, he didn’t like the fact that it needed a bulky external GPS “backpack” for APRS location data. So he decided to crack open the head unit and see if he couldn’t integrate his own GPS hardware (machine translation). Not …read more
Continue reading Mobile Transmitter Gets Internal GPS And Bluetooth
The origin of the term “breadboard” comes from an amusing past when wooden bread boards were swiped from kitchens and used as a canvas for radio hobbyists to roll homemade capacitors, inductors, and switches. At a period when commercial electronic components were limited, anything within reach was fair game.
[Andy …read more
When you start watching [learnelectronic’s] two-part series about making a radio transmitter, you might not agree with some of his history lessons. After all, the origin of radio is a pretty controversial topic. Luckily, you don’t need to know who invented radio to enjoy it.
The first transmitter uses a …read more
Continue reading Take a Break From Arduinos, And Build A Radio Transmitter
Could there be a worse fate for a guy with a Swiss accent than to be subjected to a clock that’s seconds or even – horrors! – minutes off the correct time? Indeed not, which is why [The Guy With the Swiss Accent] went to great lengths to keep his …read more
In the last installment of “The $50 Ham” I built a common tool used by amateur radio operators who are doing any kind of tuning or testing of transmitters: a dummy load. That build resulted in “L’il Dummy”, a small dummy load intended for testing typical VHF-UHF handy talkie (HT) …read more