When you get to a certain age, you get unsettled by people calling “your” music oldies. That’s how a few of us felt when we saw [Mikrowave1’s] video about Retro QRP – Solid Gold Years (see below). “QRP” is the ham radio term for low power operation, and the “solid gold” years in question are […]
The International Space Station, or ISS, has been in orbit in its various forms now for almost twenty years. During that time many of us will have stood outside on a clear night and seen it pass overhead, as the largest man-made object in space it is clearly visible without a telescope. Most ISS-watchers will […]
The circuit shown below is a fun one, especially if you’ve played with crystal radios. It receives Morse code that’s transmitted as bursts of radio waves at a specific frequency. The transmission back then was done using a spark gap transmitter. A dot is a short period of transmission at that frequency and a dash […]
We’re all used to the changes in the properties of radio frequency systems as the frequency increases and the wavelength becomes shorter. The difference between the way an FM radio and a WiFi adapter behave with respect to their environments, for instance. But these are relatively low frequencies in the scheme of electromagnetic radiation, as […]
[Chris D] noticed that the excellent software defined radio (SDR) software gqrx will run on the Raspberry Pi now. So he married a Raspberry Pi 3, a touchscreen, an RTL-SDR dongle, and an upconverter to make a very nice receiver setup. You can see the receiver in action below. The video is a little light […]
When we take a new Wi-Fi router from its box, the stock antenna is a short plastic stub with a reverse SMA plug on one end. More recent and more fancy routers have more than one such antenna for clever tricks to extend their range or bandwidth, but even if the manufacturer has encased it […]
Our Hackaday readership represent a huge breadth of engineering experience and knowledge, and we get a significant number of our story tips from you. For instance, today we are indebted to [sonofthunderboanerges] for delivering us a tip in the comment stream of one of our posts, detailing an antenna created by coupling RF into a […]
If you have a traditional regulated power supply that you want to make adjustable, you’ll have somewhere in the circuit a feedback line driven by a potential divider across the output. That divider will probably incorporate a variable resistor, which you’ll adjust to select your desired voltage. The problem with using a standard pot to […]
[B Arnold] is hearing voices and needs help from the Hackaday community. But before any of you armchair psychiatrists run off to WebMD, rest assured that [B Arnold] suffers not from schizophrenia but rather has an RF coupling problem.The project (which isn’t posted yet) is an attempt to turn a C.H.I.P into an Amazon Echo, […]
The Internet of Things is terrible when it’s your toaster. The real fun happens when you have hundreds or thousands of sensors sending data back to a base station every day. That requires low power, and that means LPWAN, the Low Power Wide Area Network. There are a lot of options for LPWAN, but few […]
[J.B. Langston] has some vintage late-40’s/early-50’s tube radios that he wanted to repair – a Motorola All-American 5 AM radio, an Air Castle AM/FM radio and a Sears Silvertone AM/FM radio. He goes over, one by one, the three vintage radios, the problems they had, and how he got them back into working order. No […]
The RS-HFIQ is a high performance Software Defined Radio (SDR) 5W Transceiver for CW, SSB, AM, FM and digital modes. 132 backers so far, $28,422 pledged of $15,000 goal and there are 24 days to go Not just another SDR – The RS-HFIQ offers real RF performance for serious communications. Covering the 80-10M Amateur Radio […]
We see a lot of old radio restoration projects around here, and we have to admit to having mixed emotions about some of them. It seems a shame to go through the effort to lovingly restore a vintage Art Deco case only to stuff it with a Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth. Seems like if you’re […]
Do you remember the early days of consumer wireless networking, a time of open access points with default SSIDs, manufacturer default passwords, Pringle can antennas, and wardriving? Fortunately out-of-the-box device security has moved on in the last couple of decades, but there was a time when most WiFi networks were an open book to any […]
Amateur radio is an eclectic hobby, to say the least. RF propagation, electrical engineering, antenna theory – those are the basics for the Ham skillset. But pneumatics? Even that could come in handy for hanging up antennas, which is what this compressed-air cannon is designed to do. [KA8VIT]’s build will be familiar to any air […]
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