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Literally me right now, got my first SDR less than a month ago because I wanted to have an FM radio for emergencies and I am designing antennas and studying for
by ews 1y ago
Literally me right now, got my first SDR less than a month ago because I wanted to have an FM radio for emergencies and I am designing antennas and studying for my amateur radio license.
- _whiteCaps_ 1y agoGood luck with the license! There's lots of people on Mastodon that chat about radio stuff.
- ews 1y agoThanks ! What accounts should I follow ?
- _whiteCaps_ 1y agoAnyone on mastodon.radio, and check out the #amateurRadio topic.
- diggan 1y ago> because I wanted to have an FM radio for emergencies Just make sure you have batteries/a way to run it! When we lost electricity for 1.5 day here last month (Spain), I thought I'd be clever and use my SDR too, but since we didn't have electricity at all, and none of my laptops were charged, I was out of luck. Wife's Macbook had battery available, but since I never used it with her Macbook, of course it didn't have the software/drivers needed, and the internet didn't work as all ISP equipment was also without electricity. Ended up listening to the radio in the car which was more than cumbersome :/ TLDR: get a shitty battery/hand-crank powered FM/AM radio for emergencies
- varispeed 1y agoRemember schematics for radios powered just by radio waves. No need for battery or hand-crank. That was in some old books, but never managed to build one.
- roelschroeven 1y agoI could be wrong but I think that only works for AM, not for FM.
- cowboylowrez 1y agosupposedly you can demodulate FM with "slope detection", off tuning slightly so as the signal varies in and out of the resonance of the tuned circuit you can get an audio signal. Its gonna be mono lol. The "Q" of the tuned circuit needs to be pretty good and its interesting to see that they use copper tubing as the coil wire or more technically in the linked page, a resonator. https://electronbunker.ca/eb/FMCrystalSet.html https://electronbunker.ca/eb/FMCrystalSet.html
- mschuster91 1y agoThat's AM crystal radio but there aren't that many AM stations left these days, most have been torn down because (thanks to AM) they need insane amounts of power to be receivable across larger distances.
- ggariepy 1y agoNot in the USA. We still have 50,000 watt clear channel stations. On a clear winter night, local lore has it that WJR-760AM Detroit could be heard in Mexico. Crystal radios still work...well, not fine, but as good as they ever did. AM frequencies are low enough they skip off the ionosphere.
- DidYaWipe 1y agoI remember a family road trip from Chicago to South Carolina in our '77 Impala wagon, when my whole family was listening to a DePaul basketball game on WBBM Chicago. My dad was a big fan. It was late at night, and the game came down to the last shot in the last second or so. The station was barely coming in, so we pulled over and heard DePaul win on a buzzer-beater... then the station blinked out. It was perfect. I always think about this when I see another story about AM's demise.
- driggs 1y agoIf you want an FM radio for emergencies, get a battery-powered analogue FM radio, not a computer running SDR!
- mycall 1y agoPacket radio, srsRAN, LoRA, Doppler Radar. So many fun things to do with SDR.