Collaborate Disseminate
It probably comes as little surprise that our planet is practically buzzing with radio waves. Most of it is of our own making, with cell phones, microwaves, WiFi, and broadcasts …read more Continue reading Homebrew Sferics Receiver Lets You Tune Into Earth Music
As far as timekeeping goes, there’s nothing more accurate and precise than an atomic clock. Unfortunately, we can’t all have blocks of cesium in our basements, so various agencies around …read more Continue reading Simulating a Time-Keeping Radio Signal
In this week’s episode of “Stupid Chatbot Tricks,” it turns out that jailbreaking ChatGPT is as easy as asking it to repeat a word over and over forever. That’s according …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: December 10, 2023
The FCC is circulating a proposal for new rules pertaining to amateur radio in the United States. In particular, they want to remove certain baud rate restrictions that have been …read more Continue reading Ham Radio May Speed Up Soon
If you want to talk about antennas, the amateur radio community has you covered, with one glaring exception. Very low frequency and Extremely Low Frequency radio isn’t practiced very much, ultimately because it’s impractical and you simply can’t transmit much information when your carrier frequency is measured in tens of …read more
Continue reading Piezoelectric Antennas For Very, Very Low Frequencies
We live in an electromagnetic soup, bombarded by wavelengths from DC to daylight and beyond. A lot of it is of our own making, especially further up the spectrum where wavelengths are short enough for the bandwidth needed for things like WiFi and cell phones. But long before humans figured out how to make their own electromagnetic ripples, the Earth was singing songs at the low end of the spectrum. The very low frequency (VLF) band abounds with interesting natural emissions, and listening to these Earth sounds can be quite a treat.
The VLF band is roughly …read more
Continue reading Sferics, Whistlers, and the Dawn Chorus: Listening to Earth Music on VLF
NASA spends a lot of time researching the Earth and its surrounding space environment. One particular feature of interest are the Van Allen belts, so much so that NASA built special probes to study them! They’ve now discovered a protective bubble they believe has been generated by human transmissions in the VLF range.
VLF transmissions cover the 3-30 kHz range, and thus bandwidth is highly limited. VLF hardware is primarily used to communicate with submarines, often to remind them that, yes, everything is still fine and there’s no need to launch the nukes yet. It’s also used for navigation …read more
Continue reading Humans May Have Accidentally Created a Radiation Shield Around Earth
If you need to generate a radio frequency electrical signal, you will make some form of electronic oscillator. We’ll probably all be used to oscillators using transistors, tubes, logic gates or a host of other electronic technologies. Similarly if you need to generate radio frequencies at high powers, you’ll couple your oscillator to an amplifier, a relatively simple task with today’s electronic parts bin.
If you needed to do the same thing with a high power radio signal in the early years of the 20th century, none of these options were open to you. There were no transistors or integrated …read more
Continue reading Get Set For SAQ On Alexanderson Day With These Active Antennas