The LakeShark is based on the LilyGO T-Display P4—which combines an ESP32-P4 microcontroller with a 4.1 inch AMOLED touchscreen display. It comes with an onboard SX1262 LoRa radio module as well as GPS and a nine-axis Inertial Measurement Unit to boot. [SAMS0N1TE] then set it up to also hook up to an RTL-SDR Blog V3 or V4, providing all kinds of extra software-defined radio functionality.
It can scan everything from P25 Phase 1 trunking transmissions, to ADS-B, POCSAG, and even good old FM broadcast radio. If you want to listen in on what’s on the air, or see a minimap with tracks of the planes flying overhead, you can do it all with this rig. You can even investigate various bands with waterfall displays or try and look for activity from nearby nRF24 devices.
Ultimately, it’s a bit of a Swiss Army knife for radio fun—able to do all kinds of neat things, and it fits right in your pocket. We’ve featured some other great SDR hacks recently, too, like this $50 build with an impressive 20 MHz of bandwidth. If you’re cooking up your own gear for the ham shack and beyond, let us know on the tipsline.
Old-school teletext with its pixelated text and block graphics may now be largely a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean it’s without enthusiasts or there’s no more life in the idea. [M7TJF] has a project which takes teletext and puts it on amateur radio through the magic of AX.25. It’s called CEEFAX Station, in honor of the BBC’s teletext offering from back in the day.
What you get is a Linux package or a Windows executable, which you run and presumably hook the computer up to a radio. It can either be a transmitting node or a receiving one for browsing pages, and there’s an online map to track who’s doing either and on what frequencies. This is all brand new so there’s not much on there at the moment, but we expect that as people try this mode, this will change.
Sadly it’s a little unclear on how the protocol works and how the pages are encoded, but it’s early days. Meanwhile if you hanker for the real thing, it’s still about in some places.
Over the years I have been to many hacker camps and done a lot of very cool things, but BornHack 2026 brought me something entirely new: Radio. By which I don’t mean radio in terms of amateur radio, LoRa, or whatever, but Radio. Broadcast radio, because the camp had a special event FM radio station for the first time. And because in a previous life I spent an inordinate amount of time in my university’s student radio station and have the Radio Voice to prove it, I was totally there for it.
The BornHack Radio nerve centre.
For a hacker camp, one of the special things about BornHack Radio was unexpected, that it was entirely analogue. No online streams, the only broadcast was over the air, 5 watts ERP from a vertical antenna stuck on a mast at the highest point of the Hylkedam scout camp site. I don’t know whether any of the residents of the isle of Funen listened, or what they made of it, but it certainly reached as far as the two closest towns.
The other unexpected feature of the station was that it had no music licensing. Personally I viewed this as an asset, because it forced the programming to be hacker-focused rather than suit the musical tastes of whichever people are enthusiastic enough to be DJs. I sincerely hope they don’t get a music licence at future events, speech-only gives it a special quality.
The studio for an analogue station like this one can be surprisingly simple, in that it’s a mixing desk to bring all the different microphones and other inputs together and set the levels, and not a lot else. the whole thing was in a Coleman shelter on the main drag through the camp, so as studios go it could have been quieter. Programming varied from talk shows through interview shows, a live feed from the speaker tent — is this the first ever Hacker Jeopardy broadcast? — and a beautifully done robotic numbers station which I suspect may also have been part of one of the on-camp games.
The thing that struck me most in my first foray into radio journalism was how straightforward it was. Wander the camp with microphone (complete with fluffy windshield and 3D-printed Hackaday cube), drop the results into Audacity, and a remarkably straightforward editing process compared to video. Last time I did this it involved 1/4″ tape and a razor blade.
So that was BornHack Radio, a new experience at a hacker camp both for those of us who ventured forth on the airwaves, and I hope also for the listeners. A format in which the live shows disappeared into the aether rather than having an online afterlife gave the whole thing a freedom rarely found in 2026. I really hope this isn’t the last time I break out the fluffy microphone at a hacker camp.
There are plenty of radios you can buy that pick up MW and SW bands if that’s what you’re into. Or, you can follow [mircemk]’s example, and whip one up yourself instead.
The build employs an ESP32 as the brains of the operation. It’s hooked up to a rotary encoder and a small colour TFT screen, which displays an old-school style tuning dial for choosing the desired frequency. This setup is paired with an Si5351—a capable clock generator chip that can deliver just about any frequency from <8KHz up to 150+ MHz on command. There’s naturally a bunch of supporting analog hardware for the radio end of things, plus a NE612 mixer IC and a PAM8403 class D audio amplifier board, hooked up to a small 0.25W speaker for audio output. [mircemk] has set up the rig to act as a simple radio set, or, with the flick of a switch, it can be configured for SDR use with an attached computer.
It’s a handsome build, and one that likely proves a pleasant way to browse the MW and SW bands on a rainy afternoon. We’ve looked at other hardware in this category before, too. Video after the break.
If you work with radio, the chances are that before too long you’ll be winding an inductor. At radio frequencies these won’t be big chunky transformer style chokes, but often air-cored affairs supported by their own rigidity. As grizzled old radio amateurs will tell you though, relying on such a coil for stability is a fool’s errand. It will shift inductance from the slightest movement, thermal expansion, or even sound. Luckily [SolderSmoke] is here to remind us of the trusty fix, in the form of Q-dope, or a polystyrene solution that dries to form a rigid low-dielectric coating.
Where this is being written it wasn’t on the market so it was more usual to use nail lacquer, but reading the piece it seems American hams swore by the stuff. That’s in the past tense because it seems it’s no longer on the market. Even there though help is at hand, because dissolving packaging polystyrene in solvent yields an acceptable substitute. There’s even an 11-year-old how-to video linked from the SolderSmoke post, should you fancy making some of your own. We suggest you proceed with caution though, polymers dissolved in solvents sounds a lot like home-made napalm, and probably puts out fumes you don’t want to breathe.
Meanwhile should you fancy experiments of your own with inductors, we’ve got you covered.
Although the CRT has largely disappeared from our everyday lives, there was a decades-long timeframe when this was effectively the only display available. It’s an analog display for an analog world, and now that almost everything electronic is digital, these amazing pieces of technology are largely relegated to retro gaming and a few other niche uses. [Maurycy] has a unique CRT that’s small enough to fit in a handheld television, but since there aren’t analog TV stations anymore, he decided to build his own with nothing but an 8-bit microcontroller and a few other small parts.
Although we do often see projects that take antiques and replace some or all of their components with modern equipment, we can also sympathize with the view that (when possible and practical) certain antique electronics should be restored rather than gutted. [David] has this inclination for his 1948 GE radio, but there are a few issues with it that prevented a complete, period-correct restoration.
The main (pun intended) issue at the start of this project was safety. The original radio had a chassis that was just as likely as not to become energized, with the only protection being the plastic housing. [David] set up an isolation transformer with a modern polarized power cable to help solve this issue, and then got to work replacing ancient capacitors. With a few other minor issues squared away this is all it took to get the radio working to receive AM radio, and he also was able to make a small modification to allow the radio to accept audio via a 3.5mm jack as well.
However, [David] also has the view that a period-correct AM transmission should accompany this radio as well and set about with the second bit of this project. It’s an adaptation of a project called FieldStation42 originally meant to replicate the experience of cable TV, but [Shane], the project’s creator, helped [David] get it set up for audio as well. A notable feature of this system is that when the user tunes away from one station, it isn’t simply paused, but instead allowed to continue playing as if real time is passing in the simulated radio world.
