Hello, my name is Warren, WF0T, I'm an amateur radio operator. I have always been fascinated with radio. There is just something magical about turning a dial and hearing a weak signal from far away.
A little about me - I'm married to a wonderful woman who doesn't quite share my enthusiasm for radio, but certainly doesn't mind me playing. Her name is Amy, she is a 2 time Ironman Wisconsin Finisher! We've both ran the Chicago marathon (different years, mine was October 10th, 2010 - 10/10/10) and we were in New York to run the marathon together in 2012 (the hurricane year - that's a blog post in itself) and did run it the following year. I have two grown children who are amazing, and one super-cute grand daughter.
This blog is a collection of my experiments with optical communication (352 THz) and my recent introduction to the world above 1 GHz.
In March of this year I built an 850nm beacon. 850nm is in the infrared part of the spectrum. The beacon uses a Digispark USB development board that uses an Atmel ATTiny85 chip. You program it with the Arduino IDE. I modified a library that Erik Linder, SM0RVV wrote called Morse and incorporated code from Leah Buechley from the MIT Media Lab who invented the LilyPad Arduino.
The code sends my call and then a series of 11 tones from 23 hz to 4.6 khz, then repeats.
The transmitter/antenna (LEDs) are Osram model SFH4550's. My beacon has 4, 2 parallel sets of 2 in series and runs for hours on a single 9 volt battery.
I presented my beacon at this year's Northern Lights Radio Society, Aurora conference.
www.nlrs.org/home/aurora
I will post my code and the schematic, in case you'd like to try it out, in a future post.
I have several new transmitter ideas on the workbench including a modulated CW transmitter as well as a voice modulator, plus several receivers.
I plan on posting schematics, code, and plenty of pictures from my experiments to excite others to try nanometers and to add to the collection of work on amateur optical communication.
