Author: Jenny List

2992 Articles

Does A Radome Affect Radio?

January 25, 2025 by 1 Comment

Not too far away from where this is being written is one of Uncle Sam’s NATO outposts, a satellite earth station for their comms system. Its most prominent feature is a radome, a huge golf-ball-like structure visible for miles, that protects a large parabolic antenna from the British weather. It makes sense not just for a superpower to protect its antennas from the elements, and [saveitforparts] is doing the same with a geodesic dome for his radio telescope experiments. But what effect does it have on the received signal? He’s made a video to investigate.

The US military radome is likely constructed of special RF-transparent materials, but this smaller version has a fibreglass skin and an aluminium frame. When he compares internal and external sky scans made with a small motorised satellite TV antenna he finds that the TV satellites are just as strong, but that the noise floor is higher and the frame is visible in the scan. It’s particularly obvious with such small dish, and his planned larger array should improve matters.

We would be curious to know whether an offset-fed dish constructed to minimise ground noise reaching the LNB, would improve matters further. It’s no surprise that the frame doesn’t impede the TV satellites though, as it is many wavelengths wide at that frequency. The video is below the break, and meanwhile, we featured the antenna he’s using here in 2023.

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Soviet Wired Radio, How It Worked

January 25, 2025 by 13 Comments

At the height of the Cold War, those of us on the western side of the wall had plenty of choice over our radio listening, even if we stuck with our country’s monolithic broadcaster. On the other side in the Soviet Union, radio for many came without a choice of source, in the form of wired radio systems built into all apartments. [Railways | Retro Tech | DIY] grew up familiar with these wired radios, and treats us to a fascinating examination of their technology, programming, and ultimate decline.

In a Soviet apartment, usually in the kitchen, there would be a “Radio” socket on the wall. Confusingly the same physical dimension as a mains socket, it carried an audio signal. The box which plugged into it was referred to as a radio, but instead contained only a transformer, loudspeaker, and volume control. These carried the centralised radio station, piped from Moscow to the regions by a higher voltage line, then successively stepped down at regional, local, and apartment block level. A later refinement brought a couple more stations on separate sub-carriers, but it was the single channel speakers which provided the soundtrack for daily life.

The decline of the system came over the decades following the end of communism, and he describes its effect on the mostly older listenership. Now the speaker boxes survive as affectionate curios for those like him who grew up with them.

You probably won’t be surprised to find twisted-wire broadcasting in use in the West, too.

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A Modem As A Cassette Interface

January 24, 2025 by 18 Comments

At least some in the audience will at some time in the distant past have loaded or saved a program on cassette, with an 8-bit home computer. The machine would encode binary as a series of tones which could be recorded to the tape and then later retrieved. If you consider the last sentence you’ll quickly realize that it’s not too far away from what a modem does, so can a modem record to cassette and decode it back afterwards? [Jesse T] set out to give it a try, and as it turns out, yes you can.

The modem talks and listens to the cassette recorder via circuitry that provides some signal conditioning and amplification, as well as making a dial tone such that the modem thinks it’s talking to a real phone line. An Arduino steps in as dial tone creator.

Of course, this is hardly a viable solution to 21st century data storage need, but that’s hardly the point as it’s a cool hack. We like it, and oddly we’ve seen a similar technique used with a retrocomputer in the past.

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A Second Rare Atari Cabinet 3D Printed

January 23, 2025 by 5 Comments

Last year we covered the creation of a 3D-printed full-size replica of an original Computer Space arcade machine, the legendary first glimmer from what would become Atari, one of the most famous names in gaming. The flowing exuberance of glitter-finished fibreglass made these machines instantly recognisable. Not so well known though is that there was a second cabinet in a similar vein from Atari. Space Race is most often seen in a conventional wooden cabinet, but there were a limited number of early examples made in an asymetric angular take on the same fibreglass recipe as Computer Space. They’re super rare, but that hasn’t stopped a replica being made by the same team and documented in a pair of videos by [RMC – The Cave].

Just like the earlier project, a start was made with a 3D model. In this case an owner of a real cabinet was found, who ran off a not-very-good scan with a mobile phone. This was then used as the basis for a much better model, and the various pieces were printed. Using all manner of reel ends gave the assembled cabinet a coat of many colours look, but after a coat of filler, paint, and then glitter lacquer, you would never know. Electronics come courtesy of modern emulation hardware and a Sony CCTV monitor, and the joysticks were made from a mixture of common hardware and 3D prints. Both the videos are below the break, and you’ll now no doubt also want to see the original project..

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An Electric Converted Tractor CAN Farm!

January 23, 2025 by 8 Comments

Last October we showed you a video from [LiamTronix], in which he applied an electric conversion to a 1960s Massey-Ferguson 65 which had seen better days. It certainly seemed ready for light work around the farm, but it’s only now that we get his video showing the machine at work. This thing really can farm!

An MF 65 wasn’t the smallest of 1960s tractors, but by today’s standards it’s not a machine you would expect to see working a thousand acres of wheat. Instead it’s a typical size for a smaller operation, perhaps a mixed farm, a small livestock farm, or in this case a horticulture operation growing pumpkins. In these farms the tractor doesn’t often trail up and down a field for hours, instead it’s used for individual smaller tasks where its carrying or lifting capacity is needed, or for smaller implements. It’s in these applications that we see the electric 65 being tested, as well as some harder work such as hauling a trailer load of bales, or even harrowing a field.

In one sense the video isn’t a hack in itself, for that you need to look at the original build. But it’s important to see how a hack turned out in practice, and this relatively straightforward conversion with a DC motor has we think proven itself to be more than capable of small farm tasks. Its only flaw in the video is a 30 minute running time, something he says he’ll be working on by giving it a larger battery pack. We’d use it on the Hackaday ancestral acres, any time!

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This Home Made Laptop Raises The Bar

January 23, 2025 by 51 Comments

With ready availability of single board computers, displays, keyboards, power packs, and other hardware, a home-made laptop is now a project within most people’s reach. Some laptop projects definitely veer towards being cyberdecks while others take a more conventional path, but we’ve rarely seen one as professional looking as [Byran Huang]’s anyon_e open source laptop. It really takes the art to the next level.

The quality is immediately apparent in the custom CNC-machined anodised aluminium case, and upon opening it up the curious user could be forgiven for thinking they had a stylish commercial machine in their hands. There’s a slimline mechanical keyboard and a glass trackpad, and that display is an OLED. In fact the whole thing had been built from scratch, and inside is an RK3588 SoC on a module sitting on a custom-designed motherboard. It required some effort for it to drive the display, a process we’ve seen cause pain to other designers, but otherwise it runs Debian. The batteries are slimline pouch cells, with a custom controller board driven by an ESP32.

This must have cost quite a bit to build, but it’s something anyone can have a go at for themselves as everything is in a GitHub repository. Purists might ask for open source silicon at its heart to make it truly open source, but considering what he’s done we’ll take this. It’s not the first high quality laptop project we’ve seen by any means, but it may be the first that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in the boardroom. Take a look at the video below the break.

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A Ribbon Microphone Is Harder Than You Think

January 22, 2025 by 21 Comments

There’s a mystique around ribbon microphones due to their being expensive studio-grade items, which has led more than one experimenter down the rabbit hole of making one. [Catherine van West] has posted her experiments in the field, and it makes for an interesting read.

The recipe for a ribbon microphone is very simple indeed — suspend a corrugated ribbon of foil in a magnetic field, and take the voltage across the ribbon. But that simplicity hides some significant issues, as the foil is much thinner than the stuff you might roast your turkey under. Such lightweight foil is extremely fragile, and the signwriters leaf used here proved to be difficult to get right.

Then when the microphone is built there’s still the exceptionally low impedance and small voltage across the ribbon to contend with. The choice here is a transformer rather than a FET preamp, which surprised us.

The result is by all accounts a decent sounding microphone, though with some hum pickup due to difficulty with shielding. Should you give one a try? Maybe not, but that hasn’t stopped others from giving it a go.