Radio Hacks

1441 Articles

Save A Packet, Use Cheap Co-Ax!

October 21, 2024 by 58 Comments

Anyone who works with radio transmitters will know all about matching and impedance, and also about the importance of selecting the best co-axial cable connecting transistor and antenna. But here’s [Steve, KD2WTU] with a different take, he’s suggesting that sometimes a not-so-good co-ax choice can make the grade. He’s passing up expensive 50 ohm cable in favour of the cheap and ubiquitous 75 ohm RG6 cable used in domestic TV and satellite receiver installations.

Fighting that received wisdom, he outlines the case for RG6. It’s cheap and it has a surprisingly low loss figure compared to some more conventional choices, something that shouldn’t be a surprise once we consider that it’s designed to carry GHz-plus signals. Where it loses is in having a lower maximum power rating. Power shouldn’t be a problem to a shoestring ham for whom 100W is QRO. Another issue is that 75 ohm coax necessitates a tuner for 50 ohm transmitters. It also has the effect of changing the resonance of some antennas, meaning a few mods may be in order.

So we’re convinced, and with the relatively QRP shack here we can’t see RG6 being a problem. Maybe it’s something to try in out next antenna experiment. Meanwhile if you’re interested in some of the background on co-ax impedance choices, we’ve been there before.

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Forget Flipper, How About Capybara?

October 20, 2024 by 26 Comments

One of the hacker toys to own over the last year has been the Flipper Zero, a universal wireless hacking tool which even caused a misplaced moral panic about car theft in Canada. A Flipper is cool as heck of course but not the cheapest of devices. Fortunately there’s now an alternative in the form of the CapibaraZero. It’s a poor-hacker’s Flipper Zero which you can assemble yourself from a heap of inexpensive modules.

At the center is an ESP32-S3 board, which brings with it that chip’s wireless and Bluetooth capabilities. To that is added an ST7789 TFT display, a PN532 NFC reader, an SX1276 LoRa and multi-mode RF module, and an IR module. The firmware can be found through GitHub. Since the repo is nearly two years old and still in active development, we’re hopeful CapibaraZero will gain features and stability.

If you’re interested in our coverage of the Canadian Flipper panic you can read it here, and meanwhile if you’re using one of those NFC modules, consider tuning it.

Fundamentals Of FMCW Radar Help You Understand Your Car’s Point Of View

October 19, 2024 by 3 Comments

Pretty much every modern car has some driver assistance feature, such as lane departure and blind-spot warnings, or adaptive cruise control. They’re all pretty cool, and they all depend on the car knowing where it is in space relative to other vehicles, obstacles, and even pedestrians. And they all have another thing in common: tiny radar sensors sprinkled around the car. But how in the world do they work?

If you’ve pondered that question, perhaps after nearly avoiding rear-ending another car, you’ll want to check out [Marshall Bruner]’s excellent series on the fundamentals of FMCW radar. The linked videos below are the first two installments. The first covers the basic concepts of frequency-modulated continuous wave systems, including the advantages they offer over pulsed radar systems. These advantages make them a great choice for compact sensors for the often chaotic automotive environment, as well as tasks like presence sensing and factory automation. The take-home for us was the steep penalty in terms of average output power on traditional pulsed radar systems thanks to the brief time the radar is transmitting. FMCW radars, which transmit and receive simultaneously, don’t suffer from this problem and can therefore be much more compact.

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FM Transmitter Remotely Controlled Via ESP32

October 18, 2024 by 14 Comments

Imagine you’ve got an FM transmitter located some place. Wouldn’t it be mighty convenient if you could control that transmitter remotely? That way, you wouldn’t have to physically attend to it every time you had to change some minor parameters! To that end, [Ricardo Lima Caratti] built a rig to do just that.

The build is based around the QN8066—a digital FM transceiver built into a single chip. It’s capable of transmitting and receiving anywhere from 60 MHz to 108 MHz, covering pretty much all global FM stereo radio bands. [Ricardo] paired this chip with an ESP32 for command and control. The ESP32 hosts an HTTP server, allowing the administration of the FM transmitter via a web browser. Parameters like the frequency, audio transmission mode, and Radio Data Service (RDS) information can be controlled in this manner.

It’s a pretty neat little build, and [Ricardo] demonstrates it on video with the radio transmitting some field day content. We’ve seen some other nifty FM transmitters over the years, too. Video after the break.

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Tiny LoRa GPS Node Relies On ESP32

October 17, 2024 by 10 Comments

Sometimes you need to create a satellite navigation tracking device that communicates via a low-power mesh network. [Powerfeatherdev] was in just that situation, and they whipped up a particularly compact solution to do the job.

As you might have guessed based on the name of its creator, this build is based around the ESP32-S3 PowerFeather board. The PowerFeather has the benefit of robust power management features, which makes it perfect for a power-sipping project that’s intended to run for a long time. It can even run on solar power and manage battery levels if so desired. The GPS and LoRa gear is all mounted on a secondary “wing” PCB that slots directly on to the PowerFeather like a Arduino shield or Raspberry Pi HAT. The whole assembly is barely larger than a AA battery.

It’s basically a super-small GPS tracker that transmits over LoRa, while being optimized for maximum run time on limited power from a small lithium-ion cell. If you’re needing to do some long-duration, low-power tracking task for a project, this might be right up your alley.

LoRa is a useful technology for radio communications, as we’ve been saying for some time. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own nifty radio comms build, or anything in that general milleu, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

A Phone? A Ham Radio? Relax! It’s Both!

October 15, 2024 by 24 Comments

A lot of hams like to carry a VHF radio. Of course, nearly everyone wants to carry a phone. Now, thanks to the kv4p HT, you don’t have to carry both. The open-source device connects to your Android smartphone and turns it into a radio transceiver. You can build it yourself for about $35. Check out the video below.

The device uses an ESP32 and only transmits one watt, but it has lots of features like APRS and scanning.

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What’s Your SWR? Are You Sure?

October 12, 2024 by 11 Comments

If you are involved in any sort of radio transmission, you probably have at least heard of SWR or standing wave ratio. Most transmitters can measure it these days and most ham radio operators have tuners that measure it, also. But what are you measuring? [KI8R] points out that if your coax has loss — and what coax doesn’t? — you are probably getting an artificially low reading by measuring at the transmitter.

The reason is that most common SWR-measuring instruments pick up voltage. If you measure, for example, 10V going out and 1V going back, you’d assume some SWR from that. But suppose your coax loses half the voltage (just to make an obvious example; if your coax loses half the voltage, you need new coax).

Now, you really have 5V getting to your antenna, and it returns 2V. The loss will affect the return voltage just like the forward voltage. Reflecting 2V from 5 is a very different proposition from reflecting 1V out of 10!

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