Retrotechtacular: First laser transmitter built 50 years ago

helium-neon-laser-transmitter

Most of the time we feature hokey film footage in our Retrotechtacular series, but we think this hack is as cool today as it was fifty years ago. [Clint] wrote in to tell us about Operation Red Line. It was an experiment performed May 3rd and 4th, 1963, which means the 50th anniversary just passed a few weeks ago. The hack involved sending data (audio in this case) over long distances using a … [Read more...]

Hammond Organ sends messages which can be decoded by a Spectrogram

hammond-organ-encodes-messages-spectrogram

Here's an interesting use for an old organ. Let it get in on your Ham radio action. [Forrest Cook]  is showing off his project which uses a Hammond Organ to encode messages which can be displayed by a Spectrogram. We've seen this type of message encoding before (just not involving a musical instrument). It's rather popular with Hams in the form of the fldigi program. An Arduino was connected … [Read more...]

WSPR transmitter shows true value of Raspberry Pi for hacking

wspr

Don't get us wrong, we love our Raspberry Pi. But if you're merely running a Linux image without adding a hardware hack into the mix you're missing out on part of the power for which the platform was developed. This project is a great example of how to embrace the Raspberry Pi's ability to deliver both low-level hardware access, and solid embedded Linux performance. [Dan Ankers] and [Threeme3] … [Read more...]

Hacking a Ham Radio

Hacked Ham Radio

For Christmas, [Lior] received a Baofeng UV5R radio. He didn't have an amateur radio license, so he decided to use it as a police scanner. Since the schematics were available, he cracked it open and hacked it. This $40 radio communicates on the 136-174 MHz and 400-480 MHz bands. It uses a one-time programmable microcontroller and the RDA1846 transceiver. With the power traces to the MCU … [Read more...]

Open source software defined radio transceiver

SDR

As the year draws to a close, we must look back and look at the advances in amateur radio this year. The RTL-SDR tuner hack, a USB TV Tuner to create a software defined radio receiver, is one of the greatest hacks of the last 12 months and a great justification for 2012 being the year of software defined radio receivers. 2013 is shaping up to have even more advances in the state of software … [Read more...]

Ancient radio repair

ancient-radio-repair

They sure don't build them like that anymore. [J.W. Koebel] managed to take this 1934 Simplex Model P radio and bring it back to life. So where do you start with a repair job like this one? Being a ham radio guy he has a good idea of what he's doing, and started by replacing the AC capacitor with one which will provide quality noise filtering. He tried to make fixes throughout that would … [Read more...]

Working software-defined radio with a TV tuner card.

radio

[Balint Seeber] just sent in a small yet timely project he's been working on: a software radio source block for the Realtek RTL2832U. Now with a cheap USB TV tuner card, you can jump right into the world of software-defined radio. [Balint]'s code comes just a week after hackaday and other outlets posted stories about using a $20 USB TV capture dongle for software defined radio. At the time, … [Read more...]