Short Wave Radio

[Birdsnest]

Anyone here have the hobby Short Wave Radio?
This seems like an interesting hobby to start. There are short wave radios available for under $100. I think it would be interesting to listen in to the police radios, or a broadcast from overseas. Guess this is on my list of things to try. If anyone has any tips to share for novices, please do. I will post some things I found as well.

[Birdsnest]

Here is something about radio wave scanners:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/radio-scanner.htm

Interesting stuff:

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=radio-scanner.htm&url=http://dmoz.org/Recreation/Radio/Scanning/

http://www.rac.ca/swl.htm

http://www.rnw.nl/realradio/html/reference.html

[int]

My father-in-law is into listening to the police scanners. And so are the newpaper and tv reporters. So if you ever want to get some free publicity...

I had a friend in childhood that built a shortwave radio scanner in boy scouts. Obviously, I was in the wrong troop.

[Melody]

i was thinking of amking a dsp-based radio

one of my professors is a radio genius

i am thinking of taking the block diagrams and circuits of one of his radio designs and implementing it in a DSP system. that would be awesome cuz all them annoying capacitors and resistors would become digital and all fit on a chip or three

better yet, i could completely ignore anything existing like i always do and start from scratch, making a 'from the ground up' shortwave dsp radio thingie

although i dont know ... and i dont think current dsp systems can handle radio frequencies (maybe too high) which are around 100MHz

however shortwave radio signals are no more than 30MHz, so they might be more manageable by a current DSP (TI has a 1GHz DS Processor.)

although i dont have the money to buy that processor... lol

so looks like my plan ends here

[Phreon]

I was into shortwave radio as a kid. Had a 1960's tube set (Hallicrafters S-120) attached to a longwire antenna in the back yard. It saw it's last use during the fall of the Berlin wall...very exciting time to listen to international radio.

Now I just have an amateur radio license.

BTW, ditch the whole scanner concept. If it doesn't have knobs you can tune by hand, what the hell is the point?

Phreon

PS, they already make DSP based radios (and trancievers) for your PC.

[int]

I had an aviation radio. I accidentally left it out though, and it was stolen. I loved just sitting outside listening to aviation traffic and control towers, watching the planes come in from miles away.

[Melody]

I know they have DSP radios already, but I want to learn something. Those existing DSP radios might be ASIC. I am not certain it is possible to implement a full radio with a programmable DSP. I guess I could start by asking my professor. Although, I remember he spoke of a top-secret algorithm he designed that calculates a 13k-tap trasfer function O_O. If that is the case....well, my intuition tells me a radio would be easily doable.

[Birdsnest]

If you are building your own radio, you do need to invest in a very good quality soldering iron, a solder sucker, magnifying light/glass helps, long nose plyers, small gauge solder, and just remember the following colour codes to read resistors.

Black = 0, Brown = 1, Red = 2, Orange = 3, Yellow = 4, Green = 5, Blue = 6, Violet = 7, Gold = 8, White = 9.

The third band represents the number of 0's. So, Red, Green, Orange,
Would be 25000 ohms, or 25 kilohms.

The secret to remember this is:
Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls, But Violet Gives Willingly.
Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gold, White

And diodes, easy, just face the dark band in the polarized direction towards line.

[Utopmk]

My grandfather has one. I remember him listening to foreign stations, and proclaiming that they were all "propoganda".

Anyway, he also told me that there are certain frequencies that you can tune into to hear local cordless and cell phone conversations. Anyone know anything about that?

[cloakable]

Anyway, he also told me that there are certain frequencies that you can tune into to hear local cordless and cell phone conversations. Anyone know anything about that?

You used to be able to, but now it's all digital.

[Utopmk]

sucks :(