Fubarino Contest: Morse Code Transmitter

December 9, 2013 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

fubarino-contest-morse-code-keyer

The Fubarino Contest entries are slowing streaming in. Here’s the first one that we’re featuring, sent in by [Nathanael Wilson]. He dusted off a project from some time ago, which is just fine with us. It’s a Morse Code transmitter which he designed for use during a fox hunt (locating a hidden transmitter using radio direction finding).

For the project he revised his old code, adding in a Morse look-up table so that the Arduino Mega 2560 can convert plain text into dots and dashes. It uses the tone library to output signals to the radio seem above. The easter egg is unlocked when shorting pin 10 at power-up. It then broadcasts a slightly altered message as interpreted above.

One of the reasons we chose to feature [Nathanael’s] entry first is that he presented it very well. Watch his video after the break to see for yourself. Then go back and check out the contest rules to get your own project submission in. After all, you can win a free Fubarino board from Microchip if you’re in the top twenty!

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Super Simple FM Transmitter

December 7, 2013 by James Hobson 29 Comments

Making your own FM radio is practically a rite of passage for hackers. How about making a small FM transmitter?

Originally designed by the Japanese multimedia artist [Tetsuo Kogawa], this simple FM transmitter can be built with only 10 components and about an hour of your time. The method shown here is one of the easiest to build, and it’s called the Manhattan Style — the same method used when [Bill Meara] built his BITX radio. It’s unique in that instead of using traces it uses one copper PCB which is used for all ground connections, and then small islands of the same PCB glued on top to form nodes for the circuit to connect to. Besides being an extremely easy way to make a PCB without any fancy tools, it also makes you think about circuits in a different light. In fact, it gives “floating ground” a whole new meaning!

While its 10 component count is impressive, it can’t beat this 3 component FM transmitter we shared a year ago! Stick around after the break to see how to make your very own.

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Retrotechtacular: WWII Paraset Spy Radio Used By French Resistance

November 26, 2013 by Todd Harrison 16 Comments

[Robert Sumption] a.k.a [W9RAS] takes on the daunting challenge of building a WWII spy radio called the Paraset as the topic of this week’s Retrotechtacular. It was originally a tube based CW (Morse code) transmitter/receiver used by the French underground to communicate with the Allies. Many of these radios were dropped behind enemy lines and could run on European AC or 6 V DC with the added advantage of being able to use most anything for an antenna, including fence wire. These small, low power and highly mobile radios tuned in the 3 to 8 MHz range were instrumental in the resistance. But they still make for a really fun scratch-built radio project.

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Amateur Radio Transmits 1000 Miles On Voice Power

November 26, 2013 by Adam Fabio 50 Comments

Many of us tried the old “Two tin cans connected by a string” experiment as kids. [Michael Rainey, AA1TJ] never quite forgot it. Back in 2009, he built “El Silbo”, a ham radio transmitter powered entirely by his voice. El Silbo is a Double Side Band (DSB) transmitter for 75 meters. While voice is used to excite the transmitter, it doesn’t actually transmit voice. El Silbo is a CW affair, so you should bone up on your Morse Code a bit before building one. Like many QRP transmitters El Silbo’s circuit is rather simple. A junk box loudspeaker is installed at the bottom of the can to convert voice power to electrical power. The signal is passed through a step up transformer, and used to excite a 75m crystal. Two NPN transistors (in this case MPS6521) pass the signal on through a second transformer. The signal is then routed through an LC network to the antenna.

Back in 2009, [Michael] brought El Silbo to the Maine coast in an attempt to make a transatlantic contact. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds – [Michael] has “crossed the pond” on less power. While the attempt wasn’t successful, [Michael] has made connections as far as 1486km, or 923 miles. That’s quite a distance for simply yelling into a tin can! One of [Michael’s] favorite El Silbo stories is a 109KM conversation (QSO) he had with W1PID. [Michael] found that the signal was so good, he didn’t have to yell at all. He reduced power by dropping to his normal speaking voice for the “dits and dahs”. The two were able to converse for 17 minutes with [Michael] only using his speaking voice for power. We think this is an amazing achievement, and once more proof that you don’t need a multi-thousand dollar shack to make contacts as a ham.

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Sniffing Data From Radio-Controlled Bus Stop Displays

November 25, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 63 Comments

A few weeks ago in Finland [Oona] discovered a radio data stream centered around 76KHz in a FM broadcast and she recently managed to decode it. This 16,000bps stream uses level-controlled minimum-shift keying (L-MSK) which detection can be quite tricky to implement. She therefore decoded the stream by treating the received signal as non-coherent binary FSK, which as a side effect increased the bit error probability. [Oona] then understood that the stream she was getting was the data broadcast by Helsinky buses to the nearby bus stop timetable displays. She even got lucky when she observed a display stuck in the middle of its bootup sequence, displaying a version string. This revealed that the system is called IBus and made by the Swedish company Axentia. However their website didn’t provide the specs for their proprietary protocol. After many hours of sniffing and coding, [Oona] successfully implemented the five layer protocol stack in Perl and can now read the arrival times of the nearby buses from her apartment.

Raspis And Arduinos For FM Broadcast Streaming

November 20, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 74 Comments

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The biggest Internet provider in Portugal needed a system to turn FM broadcast stations in Angola, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique into a web stream. Like every good project, the people in charge of the engineering turned to Hackaday staples – Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and TP-Link routers, all stuffed into an awesome modular rackmount cabinet

Each module in this gigantic rackmount system includes an Arduino, a Raspberry Pi, a Silicon Labs Si4705 FM receiver chip, and a TI USB audio capture chip that allows the Pi to turn the audio out from the radio receiver into an audio stream. All the Pis are connected to a 24 port Ethernet switch and to a separate master Raspi that converts data received from each module into an icecast stream.

The engineering behind each module is pretty impressive – they’re all hot swappable, have remote shutdown capability, and have voltage divider on the backplane to detect where in the rack it’s placed. It’s a very cool piece of engineering and a very cool example of using off-the-shelf hardware to do something that could be much, much harder.

Retrotechtacular: [Zoltán Bay’s] Moon Bounce Coulometer Signal Amplifier

November 19, 2013 by Todd Harrison 15 Comments

In the years before World War II it was theorized that shortwave radio waves could propagate through the ionosphere relatively undisturbed and allow for a signal to be bounced off the moon and returned. [Zoltán Bay] calculated that the return signal would be too faint to be detected above background noise with the radio receiving equipment of the day. To overcome this receiver dilemma he devised a new receiving element consisting of 10 coulometers sharing a common tank of a water solution. Each of the coulometers had a separate electrical connector and when current flowed through the electrode, hydrogen bubbles would form in an attached glass capillary column. By periodically sweeping through all 10 coulometers using a rotating switch attached to the radar receiver, any radar echo as well as random background noise would be readable by the amount of bubbles in the capillary columns. A single radar echo would be indistinguishable from random background noise in the columns of bubbles, but if the sweep is continued for 30 minutes any periodic radar echo would show as an increased accumulation of bubbles in a respective column. By reading these coulometers and knowing the switching period you could determine that you were receiving a true radar echo from the moon.

What an amazing apparatus to amplify a periodic signal above background noise! Nowadays we would call this a long-time integrator or persistence measurement and it’s a relatively simple task. You can download and read [Zoltán Bay’s] paper on “Reflection of Microwaves From the Moon” dated 1946 in PDF form. His integrator apparatus details start on page 17.

It took some years but in 1946 [Zoltán Bay’s] receiving apparatus was tested and did confirm reception from moon bounce. However, U.S. Army Signal Corps with better crystal frequency stabilized equipment was able to perform the same task earlier as seen in the below video without the use of an integrator. Even though the U.S. Army equipment was superior for this task [Zoltán Bay’s] apparatus enjoyed years of service in the field of planetary radar observation where such a high sensitivity scheme was still necessary.

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