RASPBERRY PI PIRATE RADIOS AND NUMBER STATIONS


I am a little late to the party but I have only recently discovered that one of my tutorials written three years ago was featured on the Adafruit blog. Whether it was a human or an automated algorithm that posted it, I am just so pleased that someone or something thought it worthy to be posted despite the photographs being blurry, the writing is terrible (even now I'm still not confident with my writing, hence this blog to help practice) and a somewhat illegal activity of interfering with local FM transmissions (see small print below). It all backs up my advice to people, that you don't have to make a project that is perfectly polished, you just have to crack on and make it, for people will see through all the roughness and home in on your idea. It also got feature over on the Instructables site too.

I wrote the Instructables tutorial as I wanted the practice writing detailed steps for my projects, as most view the production of documentation as a chore, it's a necessity in most cases as it helps others understand your work and processes. If you have a Raspberry Pi Zero just gathering dust, check out the tutorial or click on the video below and you too can have a secretive number station broadcasting codes in next to no time.
.



My favourite Raspberry Pi radio project of all has to be this one that Make featured a number of years ago. For someone just starting out and struggling with the Raspberry Pi, I remember seeing this video and instantly having a deep appreciation for writing projects that are designed to include everybody, no matter their skill level. This has stuck with me ever since and I've visited this project many times. If you have an early model of the Raspberry Pi, then you should check out the video. There is also a really helpful Instructables tutorial that I've visited many times in the past, it has a really useful complete image of the project and talks you through flashing it to your Pi's SD card.


Since submitting this tutorial I have gone on to build and experiment with many other number station and pirate radio projects featuring the BBC Microbit as well as the Raspberry Pi.

Small print:

My radio projects are purely intended for educational purposes and are not to be used to break any local laws regarding the interference of local FM frequencies. Please use these projects sensibly.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building a Ziggy Handheld

Image
Quantum Leap was an obsession of mine during the 90s and I'm still a huge fan of the show even now. As we'll be off to another comic con shortly, I wanted to try and make another prop to take along to the even and the Ziggy handheld that featured in the original series seemed a great ideas as it would be challenging to make but would be easy to carry around with me on the day. The short video below details how it was made with downloadable resources further down this page. The first thing I did was to pull up some reference material in the form of screenshots that clearly shows the handheld. There are also props that you can buy and the images they had on the various websites were a lot more detailed. From here I was able to build a simple model from within Tinkercad . I made sure I included the main blocks of the design and made up the more smaller components. I thought if I could achieve the general look and outline of the handheld, then it will be easily recognisable. I want
Read more

Building a Zoltar Fortune Teller: Part One

Image
I have always thought the mechanical fortune teller machines where a thing of wonder and I've always wondered about making one myself.  I have previously experimented with making a proof of concept miniature version here but as I had some spare time on my hands I decided to scale up to a full sized cabinet. I started by rescuing an old wardrobe that was skipped and used the panels to put together the bottom half of the cabinet. The intention is to have the bottom half collecting the money and dispensing fortune cards, with the top half house Zoltar in a framed enclosure. I removed the insides of the miniature fortune teller and made sure they still work. A friend of mine gave me a nice 1d coin panel and I made sure that this worked with the existing coin acceptor. The brains of Zoltar runs off a simple Microbit . I love these little programmable boards, they're easy to use as well as cheap and are perfect for projects like this. The code is surprisingly simple too. The Microbi
Read more

FM TRANSMITTER HACK TO BOOST THE RANGE

Image
I have always thought there is huge potential in transmitting data over the FM bands, especially when it involved one of my kite ideas. I once came up with the concept to fly a bunch of sensors via kites that would relay the information down on the ground via a low powered FM transmitter. This could then be adapted to broadcast your own recordings should you be at the beach with friends and wanted to broadcast your own radio show to the listeners below. There are many similar projects out there, take this Raspberry Pi project  here  for example. After buying a number of the old in-car FM transmitters from a car boot sale recently I decided to revisit this project and test it out only to find that the range of the things wasn’t very good at all. Although the older generation in-car FM transmitters are rumoured to have a better range than the more modern solutions, I was still only achieving a few metres. So I set about modifying the FM transmitter to see if I can boost its range some
Read more