How to turn your AM radio into a metal detector

Really? This radio could find a missing toy?

While watching Curious George on PBS Kids with my four year old, I learned something. In the episode we viewed–“Curious George, Metal Detective”–George needs a metal detector to find a toy robot he’s lost in the sand, but the one he’s borrowed has run out of batteries.  “How about making one?” his scientist friend suggests. Make one? “It’s easy,” she explains: simply by taping an AM radio and calculator together, you can make your own metal detector. George tries it, and–lo and behold–finds his missing toy.

Really? I wondered. Was this PBS show feeding my skeptical children science fiction?

I quickly googled the notion, and apparently, it works!  Watch the video below for a tutorial on building your own deluxe model:

Lessons learned? You’re never too old to learn from Curious George, PBS, or the fellow in this video.  And radios are clearly even more versatile than even I guessed.

Now, back to metal detecting…Is that another soda can?

Radio Free Sarawak is back on shortwave

(Source: Free Malaysia Today)

KUCHING: Radio Free Sarawak is back after an almost four months hiatus. It is re-launching this week with an expanded team and greater ambitions.

It kicks off with a two hour daily timeslot from 6 – 8 pm on the shortwave 17560 kHz bandwidth.
According to its media release, the RFS “will continue to focus on the concerns and interests of the ordinary people of Sarawak, mainly rural folk, who currently have no access to an independent news source. ”

“We will also address urban and Malaysia-wide issues in recognition of its popular following among internet users and listeners from other states,” said the statement.

RFS has been credited for the Chief Minister Taib Mahmud-led Barisan Nasional coalition’s losses in the mixed and rural constituencies in Sarawak in the April state polls where BN won 55 seats while the opposition made inroads with 15 seats, whilst one seat, Pelagus, went to independent George Lagong.

This was an unprecedented victory for the opposition.

Read the full article at Free Malaysia Today.

If you want to catch Radio Sarawak as DX, try 17,560 kHz between 1000-1200 UTC. Their broadcast is also available online via www.radiofreesarawak.org .

Read previous posts about RFS by clicking here.

RCI’s “The Maple Leaf Mailbag” mentions the SWLing Post

You can’t imagine how honored we are that Ian Jones of Radio Canada International’s “The Maple Leaf Mailbag” (and the Rock’n Roadshow) mentioned our site on the MLMB!

Here at the SWLing Post we blog about an innovative technology that serves up a wide and wild varieties of voices, sounds, opinions and music–all streaming wirelessly, all over the world, all of the time, at the speed of light–you only have to listen.

Yes, Ian, you’re right. Shortwave is far from dead.

I’ve been a Radio Canada International listener since my earliest listening years. Their programming is truly top-notch. The Link gives a perspective on life in Canada, typically from the unique perspective of immigrants. The MLMB is a quirky, fun, creative, highly interactive, interview-and-music program, that is (to say the least) unpredictable. Ian and his crew put their hearts into the show, and this comes through in every episode.

Welcome, Maple Leaf Mailbag listeners!  And thanks, again, Ian!

 

Video: Listening to sunspots on your shortwave radio

Digital Journal  reported that last weekend’s Sunspot 1302 was so strong that it had been detected via shortwave radio.  The following video marries the shortwave audio with images from the sunspot:

A little shortwave radio astronomy courtesy of the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Audio recorded by Thomas Ashcraft in New Mexico. Read more at the Digital Journal.

UNESCO Proclaims World Radio Day – February 13

UNESCO’s Executive Board approved item 13 of its provisional agenda “Proclamation of a World Radio Day” to be celebrated each February 13th.

The Executive’s decision is as follows:

  • Recommends to the [UNESCO] General Conference that it proclaim a World Radio Day and that this Day be celebrated on 13 February, the day the United Nations established the concept of United Nations Radio;
  • Invites all Member States, organizations of the United Nations system and other international and regional organizations, professional associations and broadcasting unions, as well as civil society, including non-governmental organizations and individuals, to duly celebrate the World Radio Day, in the way that each considers most adequate;
  • Requests the Director-General, subject to the final resolution of the General Conference, to bring this resolution to the attention of the Secretary-General of the United Nations so that World Radio Day may be endorsed by the General Assembly.

Read UNESCO’s full World Radio Day proclamation here (PDF).

Estonian engineer drags UVB-76 numbers station into the Internet era

It seems there’s no shortage of interest in numbers stations these days. This article, from Wired magazineInside The Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma:

From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether. The signal was said to emanate from the grounds of a voyenni gorodok (mini military city) near the village of Povarovo, and very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the monotony was broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences of numbers and words, often strings of Russian names: “Anna, Nikolai, Ivan, Tatyana, Roman.” But the balance of the airtime was filled by a steady, almost maddening, series of inexplicable tones.

[…][A]feed of UVB-76 had been made available online (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_uvb76/), cobbled together by an Estonian tech entrepreneur named Andrus Aaslaid, who has been enthralled by shortwave radio since the first grade. “Shortwave was an early form of the Internet,” says Aaslaid, who goes by the nickname Laid. “You dial in, and you never know what you’re going to listen to.” During one 24-hour period at the height of the Buzzer’s freak-out in August 2010, more than 41,000 people listened to Aaslaid’s feed; within months, tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, were visiting from the US, Russia, Britain, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Japan, Croatia, and elsewhere. By opening up UVB-76 to an online audience, Aaslaid had managed to take shortwave radio—one of the most niche hobbies imaginable—and rejuvenate it for the 21st century.

Today, the Buzzer’s fan base includes Kremlinologists, anarchists, hackers, installation artists, people who believe in extraterrestrials, a former Lithuanian minister of communications, and someone in Virginia who goes by the moniker Room641A, a reference to the alleged nerve center of a National Security Agency intercept facility at an AT&T office in San Francisco. (“I am interested in ‘listening,’” Room641A tells me by email. “All forms of it.”) All of them are mesmerized by this bewildering signal—now mostly buzzing, once again. They can’t help but ponder the significance of it, wondering about the purpose behind the pattern. No one knows for sure, which is both the worst and the best part of it.

Read the full 3 page article at Wired.com.

New to numbers stations? Check out our previous posts on the subject.

Also, check out UVB-76.net and listen to its live feed.