ssb

18 Articles

Two Guys, A Hotel Room And A Radio Fire

May 13, 2016 by 45 Comments

Can you build a HF SSB radio transciever in one weekend, while on the road, at parts from a swap meet? I can, but apparently not without setting something on fire.

Of course the swap meet I’m referring to is Hamvention, and Hamvention 2016 is coming up fast. In a previous trip to Hamvention, Scott Pastor (KC8KBK) and I challenged ourselves to restore tube radio gear in a dodgy Dayton-area hotel room where we repaired a WW2 era BC-224 and a Halicrafters receiver, scrounging parts from the Hamfest.

Our 2014 adventures were so much fun that it drove us to create our own hacking challenge in 2015 to cobble together a <$100 HF SSB transceiver (made in the USA for extra budget pressure), an ad-hoc antenna system, put this on the air, and make an out-of-state contact before the end of Hamvention using only parts and gear found at Hamvention. There’s no time to study manuals, antennas, EM theory, or vacuum tube circuitry.  All you have are your whits, some basic tools, and all the Waffle House you can eat.  But you have one thing on your side, the world’s largest collection of surplus electronics and radio junk in one place at one time.  Can it be done?

Continue reading “Two Guys, A Hotel Room And A Radio Fire” →

RPiTX Turns Rasberry Pi Into Versatile Radio Transmitter

November 4, 2015 by 64 Comments

Since the discovery that some USB TV tuner dongles could be used to monitor radio waves across a huge amount of spectrum, the software-defined radio world has exploded with interest. The one limiting factor, though, has been that the dongles can only receive signals; they can’t transmit them. [Evariste Okcestbon, F5OEO] (if that is his real name! Ok c’est bon = Ok this is good) has written some software that will get you transmitting using SDR with only a Raspberry Pi and a wire.

There have been projects in the past that use a Pi to broadcast radio (PiFM), but this new software (RPiTX) takes it a couple steps further. Using just an appropriately-sized wire connected to one of the GPIO pins, the Raspberry Pi is capable of broadcasting using FM, AM, SSB, SSTV, or FSQ signals. This greatly increases the potential of this simple computer-turned-transmitter and anyone should be able to get a lot of use out of it. In the video demo below the break, [Evariste] records a wireless doorbell signal and then re-transmits it using just the Rasbperry Pi.

The RPiTX code is available on GitHub if you want to try it out. And it should go without saying that you will most likely need an amateur radio license of some sort to use most of these features, depending on your locale. If you don’t have a ham radio license yet, you don’t need one to listen if you want to get started in the world of SDR. But a ham license isn’t hard to get and at this point it shouldn’t take much convincing for you to get transmitting.

Continue reading “RPiTX Turns Rasberry Pi Into Versatile Radio Transmitter” →

Get Serious With Amateur Radio; Design & Build A Single-Sideband Transceiver From Scratch Part 1

February 2, 2015 by 53 Comments

Amateur radio is the only hobby that offers its licensed operators the chance to legally design, build, and operate high power radio transceivers connected to unlimited antenna arrays for the purpose of communicating anywhere in the world. The most complicated part of this communication system is the single-sideband (SSB) high frequency (HF) transceiver. In reality, due to the proliferation of low-cost amateur equipment, there only exists a very small group of die-hards who actually design, build from scratch, and operate their own SSB transceivers. I am one of those die-hards, and in this post I will show you how to get started.

Continue reading “Get Serious With Amateur Radio; Design & Build A Single-Sideband Transceiver From Scratch Part 1” →

Build A Twitter Client With Fluid

June 25, 2008 by 7 Comments


The Fluid Site Specific Browser (SSB) is one of our favorite pieces of kit for Leopard. You can use Fluid to give web services you use constantly like Gmail, Facebook, Wikipedia, or Pandora their own icon and a browser tailored to that site’s specific workflow. Fluid based on WebKit and has plugin support among many other features. Embedded above is [Eric Eggert] showing how to create a reasonable Twitter client using it. The initial setup is identical to any other Fluid app: point it at https://twitter.com/. The clever bit is leveraging Fluid’s GreaseMonkey style userscripting support. He created a userscript to autorefresh. A second userscript is used to strip off all of the extraneous page elements leaving just the text field and the timeline. Every time you get a new message it generates a growl notification and you can even attach it to the status bar. Best of all: it avoids all API limitations since you’re accessing through the web interface.