Tag Archives: Radio

Police Baffled? Send For The Radio Amateurs!

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The police force in Evanston, Illinois had a problem on their hands. A mystery transmitter was blocking legal use of radio devices, car key fobs, cellphones, and other transmitters in an area of their city, and since it was also blocking 911 calls they decided to investigate it. Their first call for help went to the FCC who weren’t much use, telling them to talk to the manufacturers of the devices affected.

Eventually they approached the ARRL, the USA’s national amateur radio organisation, who sent along [Kermit Carlson, W9XA] to investigate. He fairly quickly identified the frequencies with the strongest …read more

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Google Unveils Their Experimental Plan For Wireless Broadband Service

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Two years ago, the FCC, with interested parties in Microsoft, Google, and many startups, created the Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS), a rule that would open up the 3550-3650 MHz band  to anyone, or any company, to create their own wireless backbone between WiFi access points. It is the wireless solution to the last-mile problem, and last year the FCC enthusiastically endorsed the creation of the CBRS.

In a recently released FCC filing, Google has announced their experimental protocol for testing the new CBRS. This isn’t fast Internet to a lamp pole on the corner of the street yet, but …read more

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Secret Riddle Retro Radio

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When [the-rene] was building an escape room, he decided to have a clue delivered by radio. Well, not exactly radio, but rather an old-fashioned radio that lets you tune to a faux radio station that asks a riddle. When you solve the riddle, a secret compartment opens up. [the-rene] says you could have the compartment contain a key or a clue or even a cookie.

The outer case is actually an old radio gutted for this purpose. In addition, a laser cut box and a servo motor form the secret compartment.

The inside of the radio is decidedly modern. A …read more

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Retrofitted Retro Radio

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In a world full of products that are only used for a brief time and then discarded, it gives a lot of us solace to know that there was a time when furniture was made out of solid wood and not particle board, or when coffee makers were made out of metal and not plastic. It’s hard to say exactly what precipitated the change to our one-time-use culture, but in the meantime there are projects that serve to re-purpose those old, durable products from another time so that they can stay relevant in today’s ever-changing world. [Jose]’s new old radio …read more

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A VNA On A 200 Euro Budget

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If you were to ask someone who works with RF a lot and isn’t lucky enough to do it for a commercial entity with deep pockets what their test instrument of desire would be, the chances are their response would mention a vector network analyser. A VNA is an instrument that measures the S-parameters of an RF circuit, that rather useful set of things to know whose maths in those lectures as an electronic engineering student are something of a painful memory for some of us.

The reason your RF engineer respondent won’t have a VNA on their bench already …read more

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Russian Decapping Madness

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It all started off innocently enough. [mretro] was curious about what was inside a sealed metal box, took a hacksaw to it and posted photographs up on the Interwebs. Over one hundred forum pages and several years later, the thread called (at least in Google Translate) “dissecting room” continues to amaze.

If you like die shots, decaps, or teardowns of oddball Russian parts, this is like drinking from a firehose. You can of course translate the website, but it’s more fun to open it up in Russian and have a guess at what everything is before peeking. (Hint: don’t look …read more

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Not Quite 101 Uses For An Analog UHF TV Tuner

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Young electronics hackers today are very fortunate to grow up in an era with both a plethora of capable devices to stimulate their imagination, and cheap and ready access to them. Less than the price of a hamburger meal can secure you a Linux computing platform such as the Raspberry Pi Zero, and a huge choice of sensors and peripherals are only an overnight postage envelope away.

Casing back a few decades to the 1980s, things were a little different for electronically inclined youth. We had the first generation of 8-bit microcomputers but they were expensive, and unless you had …read more

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GPS And SDR Combine Forces

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Software-defined radio (or SDR) is a relatively new (to average tinkerers, at least) way of sending and receiving radio signals. The interest in SDR exploded recently with the realization that cheap USB TV tuner cards could be used to start exploring the frequency spectrum at an extremely reduced cost. One of the reasons that this is so advantageous is because of all of the options that a general-purpose computer opens up that go beyond transmitting and receiving, as [Chris] shows with his project that ties SDR together with GPS.

The goal of the project was to automatically tune a radio …read more

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FCC to Investigate Raised RF Noise Floor

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If you stand outside on a clear night, can you see the Milky Way? If you live too close to a conurbation the chances are all you’ll see are a few of the brighter stars, the full picture is only seen by those who live in isolated places. The problem is light pollution, scattered light from street lighting and other sources hiding the stars.

The view of the Milky Way is a good analogy for the state of the radio spectrum. If you turn on a radio receiver and tune to a spot between stations, you’ll find a huge amount …read more

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