Shortwave Radio Picks up Sideband

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With the push to having most of a radio receiver as part of a PC, it might seem odd to have a standalone communication receiver, but [OM0ET] reviews the latest one he picked up, an ATS25. Inside isn’t much: a battery, a speaker, an encoder, and a Si4732 that provides the RF muscle.

It appears the receiver is pretty broadband which could be a problem. [OM0ET] suggests adding selectivity in the antenna or adding an extra board to use as a bandpass filter.

The design is simple enough, we are sure you could easily hack the unit to do different things. Most coverage stops at 30MHz, but there is an FM band, so we wondered if you could get the thing to work on other frequencies, too.

Clearly, the Arduino portion would be easily hackable. For the price, we were both impressed with the touchscreen and build, but maybe less impressed with the RF filtering. On the other hand, the small form factor would be great for backpacking or portable use and it isn’t that expensive. It does seem to work pretty well in practice.

We’ve seen similar homebrew radios using the same chipset or, at least, a similar one.



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