Sunday, May 19, 2019

Radio Sunday #8 - Wrap Up

I've spent three hours this morning trying to envision what Radio Sunday #8 should be about without coming up with any real ideas.  That seems to be a pretty solid indication that the series is over; at least from my standpoint.

Mrs. Graybeard suggested something on antennas, but I've written many pieces about antennas over the years, much more than the things in the first seven installments of this column.  Let me post a few links to some highlights.
 For more information, in the list of Pages on the right side bar see
Is the series really over?  I leave that up to you.  There are others who write pieces on tactical use of radios, and introductions to ham radio can be found all over online (I've done those here, too).  If there are other things you'd like to see covered, leave me a comment or send me an email at sigraybeard at gmail. 


  1. If there are other things you'd like to see covered

    How about, 'improvements current technology will enable after the legislative monopoly is removed by government bankruptcy:'

    1. The area coverage of the current cell phone system or better

    2. The powerful hardware of current smart phones

    3. The inability to track of TOR

    4. The inability to decrypt and spoof of GPG

    5. Currency moves over and between phones

    6. A price for buying single calls without long-term contracts

    7. Accepting incoming calls from unknown numbers would charge a fee to reduce spam

    8. Some phones would be open source, hardware and software, completely all the way down

    The current cell phone offerings are parole ankle bracelets because the government and corporate bureaucracies want it that way.

    1. Sorry, but I know virtually nothing about those subjects. The only half exception is that I've talked about TOR in the past and have used TAILS, but you could do better than me.

  2. I've enjoyed Radio Sunday. Thank you for publishing it.

    The latest QST has a short article on a VLF/LF/MW SDR receiver built from an ST Micro demo board that costs under $30 complete with a small touch screen display along with some money invested in some external filtering components. It might even be able to brought up to a full transceiver from the looks of it. The website for the project is:

    1. I missed that project, somehow, but the link is good.

      I can tell you how to convert that chunk of spectrum up to where the $25 RTL SDR can do the same things, but you probably know how.

      Different versions of that little dongle have different frequency ranges. Mine has a lower limit of 24 MHz. So you build a crystal oscillator that runs a bit above that. Anything in the tuning range would be fine, so I'll say 25 MHz for example, but it's not critical. Shove that into the LO port on a mixer. Build a low pass filter to pass DC to cutoff at 1.5 MHz and apply that to the IF port of the mixer. This will mix it up to now be tuned at 25 to 26.5 MHz and come out on the RF port. Connect the RF output to the RTL-SDR's input.

      With this, if you're tuned to 25.060 MHz, you're actually receiving 60 kHz. 25.540 would get you the lower end of the AM Broadcast Band, 540 kHz.

  3. Speaking about antennas ... did you hear about the two antennas that got married?

    The wedding was only so-so ... but the reception was TERRIFIC!