Arduinofied QRP radio beacon

moxpd

A while back, [m0xpd] picked up an unbearably cheap AD9850 DDS module from ebay. He turned this in to a Raspberry Pi-powered radio beacon, but like so many builds that grace our pages, the trolls didn’t like using such an overpowered computer for such a simple device. To keep those trolls quiet, [m0xpd] is back again, this time using the … Read the rest

Weightless, the hopefully-not-vaporware Internet of Things chip

Weightless

Imagine a single chip able to interface with your Ethernet, USB, and serial devices, turn those connections into wireless radio signals with miles of range, able operate off a single AA battery, and costs less than $2. That’s the promise of the Weightless special interest group that wants to put several hopefully not vaporware radio chips in the hands of … Read the rest

Arduino as an inexpensive ham radio frequency counter

Arduino-Frequency-Counter-Part1.Still003

[Todd Harrison] really has our number. Like him, we don’t want to spend money when we don’t have to, and hacking our own solutions is a lot more fun anyway. This time around he’s helping out a friend who is a ham radio enthusiast. The friend’s radio didn’t come with a frequency display, and buying the add-on would cost more … Read the rest

bladeRF, your next software defined radio

SDR

By now you might have a bit weary of your small and inexpensive TV tuner dongle software defined radio. Yes, using a USB TV dongle is a great introduction to SDR, but it has limited bandwidth, limited frequency range, and can’t transmit. Enter the bladeRF, the SDR that makes up for all the shortcomings of a USB dongle, and … Read the rest

Great antenna for software defined radio is really easy to make

800px-Ezcap_EzTV668

The University of Kent’s hackerspace, TinkerSoc, recently had a talk on software-defined radio using an incredibly inexpensive USB TV tuner. Of course this is nothing new to Hackaday readers, but they did manage to build one of the best antennas for their TV dongle. It’s a discone antenna, and is perfectly suited for tuning into a whole bunch of … Read the rest

Adding shoulder buttons to an RC transmitter

radio

[Gerard] does puppeteering and animatronics work, and to remotely control his creations and characters he uses an off-the-shelf remote control radio. It’s you basic 6-channel setup, but [Gerard] wanted a way to control eye blinks and other simple actions with the press of a button. Sure, he could use the toggle switches on his transmitter, but he wanted something that … Read the rest

Raspberry Pi used as a beacon transmitter

rpi-beacon-transmitter

[m0xpd] got his hands on an inexpensive AD9850 DDS Module from eBay but needed a way to control it. He took inspiration from the projects that used a PIC microcontroller, but decided to add his own twist by using a Raspberry Pi to build a multi-mode beacon transmitter.

At the center of this breadboarded circuit lies the green AD9850 … Read the rest