Supercon 2023: Receiving Microwave Signals From Deep-Space Probes

October 10, 2024 by 5 Comments

Here’s the thing about radio signals. There is wild and interesting stuff just getting beamed around all over the place. Phrased another way, there are beautiful signals everywhere for those with ears to listen. We go about our lives oblivious to most of them, but some dedicate their time to teasing out and capturing these transmissions.

David Prutchi is one such person. He’s a ham radio enthusiast that dabbles in receiving microwave signals sent from probes in deep space. What’s even better is that he came down to Supercon 2023 to tell us all about how it’s done!

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Boss Byproducts: Fordites Are Pieces Of American History

August 28, 2024 by 17 Comments

Some of the neatest products are made from the byproducts of other industries. Take petroleum jelly, for example. Its inventor, Robert Chesebrough, a chemist from New York, came upon his idea while visiting the oil fields of Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. It took him ten years to perfect his formula, but the product has been a household staple ever since. Chesebrough so believed in Vaseline that he ingested a spoonful of it every day, and attributed his 96-year longevity to doing so.

Well, some byproducts can simply be beautiful, or at least interesting. On that note, welcome to a new series called Boss Byproducts. We recently ran an article about a laser-engraved painting technique that is similar to the production of Fordite. I had never heard of Fordite, but as soon as I found out what it was, I had to have some. So, here we go!

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A Simple But Effective Receiving Loop Antenna

August 25, 2024 by 21 Comments

There’s a joke in the world of radio that all you need for a HF antenna is a piece of wet string, but the truth is that rudimentary antennas rarely perform well. Random pieces of wire may pull in some signal, but along with it comes a ton of unwanted interference and noise. It’s thus worth putting in the effort to make a better antenna, and if you’re not fortunate enough to have a lot of space, your best choice may be a magnetic loop. [Robert Hart] takes us through the design of a receive-only coaxial loop. It’s referred to as a Moebius loop because the conductor takes a “twist” path between the inner and outer halfway around.

The idea of a loop antenna is simple enough. It’s an inductor intended to respond to the magnetic portion of the wave rather than the electric part. They’re normally made of a single turn of wire in a loop of diameter well below half a wavelength, and, in their transmitting versions, they are often tuned to resonance by an air-spaced variable capacitor. Coaxial loops like this one provide enhanced resistance to electrical noise. He’s using some rather expensive Andrews coax for its rigidity, but the less well-heeled can use cheaper stuff without penalty. The result, when put on a frame of PVC pipe and a speaker stand, is an excellent portable receiving antenna, and if we’re being honest, something we might also consider in our own shack.

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A USA Feature For A Europe-Market Sony Receiver

August 16, 2024 by 23 Comments

A feature of many modern network-connected entertainment devices is that they will play streamed music while on standby mode. This so-called “network standby”is very useful if you fancy some gentle music but don’t want the Christmas lights or the TV. It was a feature [Caramelfur] missed on their Sony AV receiver, something especially annoying because it’s present on the US-market equivalent of their European model. Some gentle hackery ensued, and now the rece3iver follows its American cousin.

A first examination of the firmware found the two downloads to be identical, so whatever differences had to be in some form of configuration. Investigating what it exposed to the network led to a web server with device configuration parameters. Some probing behind the scenes and a bit of lucky guesswork identified the endpoint to turn on network standby, and there it was, the same as the US market model. Should you need it, the tooling is in a GitHub repository.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen identical hardware being shipped with different firmwares in Europe from that in the USA, perhaps our most egregious example was a Motorola phone with a much earlier Android version for Europeans. We don’t understand why manufacturers do it, in particular with such an innocuous feature as network standby. If you have a Sony receiver you can now fix it, but you shouldn’t have to.

RJ45, Devcore, CC0.

A Soviet Cassette Recorder Receiving Some Love

July 29, 2024 by 40 Comments

For those of us who lived in the capitalist west during the Cold War, there remains a fascination to this day about the Other Side. The propaganda we were fed as kids matched theirs in describing the awful things on the other side of the wall, something that wasn’t borne out when a decade or so later in the 1990s we met people from the former communist side and found them unsurprisingly to be just like us. It’s thus still of interest to have a little peek into Eastern Bloc consumer electronics, something we have the chance of courtesy of [DiodeGoneWild], who’s fixing a 1980s Soviet cassette recorder.

The model in question is a Vesna 309, and it has some audio issues and doesn’t turn the tape. It gets a teardown, the motor is cleaned up inside, and a few capacitor and pot cleanups later it’s working again. But the interest lies as much in the machine itself as it does in the repair, as it’s instructive to compare with a Western machine of the same period.

We’re told it would have been an extremely expensive purchase for a Soviet citizen, and in some ways such as the adjustable level control it’s better-specified than many of our equivalents. It’s based upon up-to-date components for its era, but the surprise comes in how comparatively well engineered it is. A Western cassette deck mechanism would have been a much more sketchy affair than the substantial Soviet one, and its motor would have been a DC part with a simple analogue speed controller rather than the brushless 3-phase unit in the Vesna. Either we’re looking at the cassette deck for senior comrades only, or the propaganda was wrong — at least about their cassette decks. The full video is below, and if you’re hungry for more it’s not the first time we’ve peered into electronics from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain.

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A Nostalgic Look At A Kid’s Shortwave Receiver

July 18, 2024 by 10 Comments

[Mikrowave1] had a Unelco shortwave receiver as a kid. This was a typical simple radio for the 1960s using germanium and silicon transistors. It also had plug-in coils you had to insert into sockets depending on the frequency band you wanted to receive.

While simple AM radios were all the rage, they didn’t have to operate at higher frequencies. [Mikrowave1] shows some of the design tricks used to allow the radio to operate in the upper part of the spectrum. Otherwise, the radio is the usual superhet design using lower frequency germanium PNP transistors in the IF stage. You get a look inside the radio and a peek at a similar schematic along with notes on where the radio is different.

But how does it work? For an old single-conversion receiver, it works well enough. Of course, when the radio was new, there were many more interesting stations on shortwave. Today, he had to settle for some ham radio stations and CHU, the Canadian time and frequency station.

There were six pairs of coils built on top of tube sockets. The coil was actually more than a coil. There were other components in the case that adjusted other radio parameters based on the frequency.

[Mikrowave1] has been on a toy kick lately, and we’ve enjoyed it. This radio looks simple compared to the Radio Shack one that every kid wanted in the 1970s. Well. Every hacker kid, at least.

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Smart Ball Technology Has Reached Football, But The Euros Show Us It’s Not Necessarily For The Better

July 16, 2024 by 56 Comments
Adidas brought smart balls to Euro 2024, for better or worse. Credit: Adidas

The good old fashioned game of football used to be a simple affair. Two teams of eleven, plus a few subs, who were all wrangled by a referee and a couple of helpful linesmen. Long ago, these disparate groups lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when VAR attacked.

Suddenly, technology was being used to adjudicate all kinds of decisions, and fans were cheering or in uproar depending on how the hammer fell. That’s only become more prevalent in recent times, with smart balls the latest controversial addition to the world game. With their starring role in the Euro 2024 championship more than evident, let’s take a look at what’s going on with this new generation of intelligent footballs.

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