Art Bell, the Radio Host Who Made America Believe in UFOs, Is Dead at 72
Goodbye to the man who brought the world UFOs, Area 51, and Alex Jones. Continue reading Art Bell, the Radio Host Who Made America Believe in UFOs, Is Dead at 72
Tag Archives: Radio
Clive Sinclair, The Other Author
A reasonable selection of the Hackaday readership will have had their first experiences of computing on an 8-bit machine in a black case, with the word “Sinclair” on it. Even if you haven’t work with one of these machines you probably know that the man behind them was the sometimes colourful inventor Clive (now Sir Clive) Sinclair.
He was the founder of an electronics company that promised big results from its relatively inexpensive electronic products. Radio receivers that could fit in a matchbox, transistorised component stereo systems, miniature televisions, and affordable calculators had all received the Sinclair treatment from the …read more
An SSB Transceiver Using Only One Device? Surely not!
There are a multiplicity of transmission modes both new and old at the disposal of a radio amateur, but the leader of the pack is still single-sideband or SSB. An SSB transmitter emits the barest minimum of RF spectrum required to reconstitute an audio signal, only half of the mixer product between the audio and the RF carrier, and with the carrier removed. This makes SSB the most efficient of the analog voice modes, but at the expense of a complex piece of circuitry to generate it by analog means. Nevertheless, radio amateurs have produced some elegant designs for SSB …read more
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Monitor Foot Traffic Using Radio
We talk a lot about information security around here, but in reality it’s not at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Most people are content to walk around with their phones constantly looking for WiFi or Bluetooth connections despite the dangers. But if you’re not a black hat sort of person, you can do something like [Verkehrsrot] did and use all of these phones to do something useful and harmless.
[Verkehrsrot]’s project involves building a radio listening device in order to get an estimate of the amount of traffic in a particular area. The device polls for and detects WiFi and …read more
Speaking the Same Language as a Wireless Thermometer
Temperature is a delicate thing. Our bodies have acclimated to a tight comfort band, so it is no wonder that we want to measure and control it accurately. Plus, heating and cooling are expensive. Measuring a single point in a dwelling may not be enough, especially if there are multiple controlled environments like a terrarium, pet enclosure, food storage, or just the garage in case the car needs to warm up. [Tim Leland] wanted to monitor commercially available sensors in several rooms of his house to track and send alerts.
The sensors of choice in this project are weather resistant …read more
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Review: LimeSDR Mini Software Defined Radio Transceiver
It’s fair to say that software-defined radio represents the most significant advance in affordable radio equipment that we have seen over the last decade or so. Moving signal processing from purpose-built analogue hardware into the realm of software has opened up so many exciting possibilities in terms of what can be done both with more traditional modes of radio communication and with newer ones made possible only by the new technology.
It’s also fair to say that radio enthusiasts seeking a high-performance SDR would also have to be prepared with a hefty bank balance, as some of the components required …read more
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An Autonomous Drone For Working Rare Squares
Amateur radio is an extremely broad church when it comes to the numerous different activities that it covers. Most of the stories featuring radio amateurs that we cover here have involved home-made radios, but that represents a surprisingly small subset of licence holders.
One activity that captivates many operators is grid square collecting. The map is divided into grid squares, can you make contact with all of them? Land-based squares in Europe and North America are easy, those in some more sparsely populated regions a little less so, and some squares out in the ocean are nigh-on impossible. As an …read more
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LTE Flaw-O-Rama
Following up on our Tuesday post entitled ‘4G Gone Wild (and the trigger for that post – Zero Day author Zack Whittaker’s) superlative piece), another author – Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica – has posted a highly detailed article presenting his take o… Continue reading LTE Flaw-O-Rama
At 71,572 KM, You Won’t Beat This LoRa Record
A distance record for LoRa transmission has been set that you probably won’t be able to beat. Pack up your gear and go home, nothing more to achieve here. At a superficial reading having a figure of 71,572 km (44,473 miles) seems an impossible figure for one of the little LoRa radio modules many of us have hooked up to our microcontrollers, but the story isn’t quite what you’d expect and contains within it some extremely interesting use of technology.
So the folks at Outernet have sent data over LoRa for that incredible distance, but they did so not through …read more
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You All Know Reginald Fessenden. Who?
Quick, name someone influential in the history of radio. Who do did you think of? Marconi? Tesla? Armstrong? Hertz? Perhaps Sarnoff? We bet only a handful would have said Reginald Fessenden. That’s a shame because he was the first to do something that most of us do every day.
Few know this Canadian inventor’s name even though he developed quite a few innovations. Unlike Colpitts and Hartley we don’t have anything named after him. However, Fessenden was the first man to make a two-way transatlantic radio contact (Marconi’s was one way) and he was a pioneer in using voice over …read more