time station

2 Articles

2025 One Hertz Challenge: Blinking An LED With The Aid Of Radio Time

August 14, 2025 by 3 Comments

If you want to blink an LED once every second, you could use just about any old timer circuit to create a 1 Hz signal. Or, you could go the complicated route like [Anthony Vincz] and grab 1 Hz off a radio clock instead. 

The build is an entry for the 2025 One Hertz Challenge, with [Anthony] pushing himself to whip up a simple entry on a single Sunday morning. He started by grabbing a NE567 tone decoder IC, which uses a phase-locked loop to trigger an output when detecting a tone of a given frequency. [Anthony] had used this chip hooked up to an Arduino to act as a Morse decoder, which picked up sound from an electret mic and decoded it into readable output.

However, he realized he could repurpose the NE567 to blink in response to output from radio time stations like the 60 KHz British and 77.5 KHz German broadcasts. He thus grabbed a software-defined radio, tuned it into one of the time stations, and adjusted the signal to effectively sound a regular 800 Hz tone coming out of his computer’s speakers that cycled once every second. He then tweaked the NE567 so it would trigger off this repetitive tone every second, flashing an LED.

Is it the easiest way to flash an LED? No. It’s complicated, but it’s also creative. They say a one hertz signal is always in the last place you look.

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Gathering Eclipse Data Via Ham Radio

November 30, 2020 by 12 Comments

A solar eclipse is coming up in just a few weeks, and although with its path of totality near the southern tip of South America means that not many people will be able to see it first-hand, there is an opportunity to get involved with it even at an extreme distance. PhD candidate [Kristina] and the organization HamSCI are trying to learn a little bit more about the effects of an eclipse on radio communications, and all that is required to help is a receiver capable of listening in the 10 MHz range during the time of the eclipse.

It’s well-known that certain radio waves can propagate further depending on the time of day due to changes in many factors such as the state of the ionosphere and the amount of solar activity. What is not known is specifically how the paths can vary over the course of the day. During the eclipse the sun’s interference is minimized, and its impact can be more directly measured in a more controlled experiment. By tuning into particular time stations and recording data during the eclipse, it’s possible to see how exactly the eclipse impacts propagation of these signals. [Kristina] hopes to take all of the data gathered during the event to observe the doppler effect that is expected to occur.

The project requires a large amount of volunteers to listen in to the time stations during the eclipse (even if it is not visible to them) and there are only a few more days before this eclipse happens. If you have the required hardware, which is essentially just a receiver capable of receiving upper-sideband signals in 10 MHz range, it may be worthwhile to give this a shot. If not, there may be some time to cobble together an SDR that can listen in (even an RTL-SDR set up for 10 MHz will work) provided you can use it to record the required samples. It’s definitely a time that ham radio could embrace the hacker community.