We’re not very far into the AI revolution at this point, but we’re far enough to know not to trust AI implicitly. If you accept what ChatGPT or any of the other AI chatbots have to say at face value, you might just embarrass yourself. Or worse, you might make a mistake designing your next antenna.

We’ll explain. [Gregg Messenger (VE6WO)] asked a seemingly simple question about antenna theory: Does an impedance mismatch between the antenna and a coaxial feedline result in common-mode current on the coax shield? It’s an important practical matter, as any ham who has had the painful experience of “RF in the shack” can tell you. They also will likely tell you that common-mode current on the shield is caused by an unbalanced antenna system, not an impedance mismatch. But when [Gregg] asked Google Gemini and ChatGPT that question, the answer came back that impedance mismatch can cause current flow on the shield. So who’s right?

In the first video below, [Gregg] built a simulated ham shack using a 100-MHz signal generator and a length of coaxial feedline. Using a toroidal ferrite core with a couple of turns of magnet wire and a capacitor as a current probe for his oscilloscope, he was unable to find a trace of the signal on the shield even if the feedline was unterminated, which produces the impedance mismatch that the chatbots thought would spell doom. To bring the point home, [Gregg] created another test setup in the second video, this time using a pair of telescoping whip antennas to stand in for a dipole antenna. With the coax connected directly to the dipole, which creates an unbalanced system, he measured a current on the feedline, which got worse when he further unbalanced the system by removing one of the legs. Adding a balun between the feedline and the antenna, which shifts the phase on each leg of the antenna 180° apart, cured the problem.

We found these demonstrations quite useful. It’s always good to see someone taking a chatbot to task over myths and common misperceptions. We look into baluns now and again. Or even ununs.

Do you remember the fourth-place winner in the 2022 Hackaday Prize? If it’s slipped your mind, that’s okay—it was Boondock Echo. It was a radio project that aimed to make it easy to record and playback conversations from two-way radio communications. The project was entered via Hackaday.io, the judges dug it, and it was one of the top projects of that year’s competition.

The project was the brainchild of Mark Hughes and Kaushlesh Chandel. At the 2023 Hackaday Supercon, Mark and Kaushlesh (KC) came back to tell us all about the project, and how far it had come one year after its success in the 2022 Hackaday Prize.

Breaker, Breaker

The talk begins with a simple video explainer of the Boondock Echo project. Basically, it points out the simple problem with two-way radio communications. If you’re not sitting in front of the receiver at the right time, you’re going to miss the message someone’s trying to send you. Unlike cellular communications, Skype calls, or email, there’s no log of missed calls or messages waiting for you. If you weren’t listening, you’re out of luck.

Mark was inspired to create a device to solve these problems by his father’s experience as an emergency responder with FEMA. Often, his father would tell stories about problems with radios and missed transmissions, and Mark had always wondered if something could be done.

Boondock Echo is the device that hopes to change all that. It’s a device designed for recording and playback of two-way radio communications. The hardware is based around the ESP32, which is able to capture analog audio from a radio, digitize it, and submit it to the Boondock Echo online service. This also enables more advanced features—the system can transcribe audio to text, and even do keyword monitoring on the results and email you any important relevant messages.

Rather amazingly, Hackaday actually helped spawn this project. Mark had an idea of what Boondock Echo should do, but he didn’t feel like he had the full set of technical skills to implement it. Then, Mark met KC via a Hackaday Hackchat, and the two started a partnership to develop the project further. Eventually, they won fourth place in the 2022 Hackaday Prize, which netted them a tasty $10,000 which they could use to develop the project further. They then brought in Mark’s friend Jesse on the hardware side, and things really got rolling.

The hope was to start producing and delivering Boondock Echo devices. Of course, nobody is immune to production hell, and it was no different for this team. KC dives into the story of how the device relied on the ESP32-A1S module. When they went to make more, this turned out to be problematic. They found some of the purchased modules worked and some didn’t. Stripping the RF shields off the pre-baked modules, they found that while they all included audio codec chips marked “8388,” some modules had a different layout and functioned differently. And these were parts with FCC IDs, identical part numbers, and everything! This turned into a huge mess that derailed the project for some time. The project had to be retooled to work with the ESP32-based AI Thinker Audio Kit, to which they added a custom “sidekick” board to handle interfacing with the desired radio hardware.

Mark notes that there were some organizational lessons learned through this difficult journey. He talks about the value of planning and budgets when it comes to any attempt to escape the “Valley of Death” as a nascent startup. Mark also explains how Boondock Echo came to seek investors to grow further when he realized they didn’t have the resources to make it on their own.

“You don’t go out asking for $10,000 from family and friends, you go out and you ask for a heck of a lot more than that from professional investors,” explains Mark. “It’s a lot easier to come up with $100,000 than $10,000, because the venture capitalists don’t play in the $10,000 price range.” Of course, he notes that this comes with a tradeoff—investors want a stake in the company in exchange for cold, hard cash. Moving to this mode of operation involved creating a company and then dividing up shares for all the relevant stakeholders—a unique challenge of its own. Mark and KC explain how they handled the growing pains and grew their team from there.

The rest of the talk covers the product itself, and we get a demo of what it can do. KC and Mark show us how the Boondock Echo units capture audio, record it, and submit it to the cloud. From there, we get to see how things like AI transcription, keyword triggers, and notifications work, and there’s even a fun live demo. Beyond that, Mark explains how you can order the hardware via CrowdSupply, and sign up with the Boondock Echo cloud service.

It’s not just neat to see a cool project, it’s neat to see something like this grow from an idea into a fully-fledged business. Even better, it grew out of the Hackaday community itself, and has flourished from there. It’s a wonderful testament to what hackers can achieve with a good idea and the will to pursue it.

Ideally, if you are going to transmit, you want a properly-tuned resonant antenna. But, sometimes, it isn’t practical. [Ham Radio Rookie] knew about random wire antennas but didn’t want a wire antenna. So, he took carbon fiber extension poles and Faraday tape and made a “random stick” antenna. You can check it out in the video below.

We aren’t sure what normal people are doing with 7-meter-long telescoping poles, but — as you might expect — the carbon fiber is not particularly conductive. That’s where the tape comes in. Each section gets some tape, and when you stretch it out, the tape lines up.

We aren’t sure how these poles are constructed, but the video claims that the adjacent sections couple capacitively. We aren’t sure about that as the carbon fiber won’t be very conductive, but it probably isn’t a very good insulator, either. Then again, the poles may have a paint or other coating along the surface. So without seeing it, it is hard to say what’s coupling the elements.

He admits this is experimental and there is more work to do. However, it seems cheap and easy to setup. The hardest part is tapping an M10 hole in the end cap to allow things to mount.

We suppose you could make your own tubes, but it hardly seems worth the trouble. If you cut or drill this stuff, you might want to take precautions.

The regenerative radio is long-ago superseded in commercial receivers, but it remains a common project for electronics or radio enthusiasts seeking to make a simple receiver. It’s most often seen for AM band receivers or perhaps shortwave ham band ones, but it’s a circuit which also works at much higher frequencies. [Perian Marcel] has done just this, with a regenerative receiver for the FM broadcast band.

The principle of a regenerative receiver is that it takes a tuned radio frequency receiver with a wide bandwidth and poor performance, and applies feedback to the point at which the circuit is almost but not quite oscillating. This has the effect of hugely increasing the “Q”, or quality factor of the receiver, giving it much more sensitivity and a narrow bandwidth. They’re tricky to tune but they can give reasonable performance, and they will happily slope-demodulate an FM transmission.

This one uses two tubes from consumer grade TV receivers, the “P” at the start of the part number being the giveaway for a 300mA series heater chain. The RF triode-pentode isn’t a radio part at all, instead it’s a mundane TV field oscillator part pushed into service at higher frequencies, while the other triode-pentode serves as an audio amplifier. The original circuit from which this one is adapted is available online, All in all it’s a neat project, and a reminder that exotic parts aren’t always necessary at higher frequencies. The video is below the break.

As far as hobbies go, ham radio tends to be on the more expensive side. A dual-band mobile radio can easily run $600, and a high-end HF base station with the capability of more than 100 watts will easily be in the thousands of dollars. But, like most things, there’s an aspect to the hobby that can be incredibly inexpensive and accessible to newcomers. Crystal radios, for example, can be built largely from stuff most of us would have in our parts drawers, CW QRP radios don’t need much more than that, and sometimes even the highest-performing antennas are little more than two lengths of wire.

For this specific antenna, [W3CT] is putting together an inverted-V which is a type of dipole antenna. Rather than each of the dipole’s legs being straight, the center is suspended at some point relatively high above ground with the two ends closer to the earth. Dipoles, including inverted-Vs, are resonant antennas, meaning that they don’t need any tuning between them and the radio so the only thing needed to match the antenna to the feed line is a coax-to-banana adapter. From there it’s as simple as attaching the two measured lengths of wire for the target band and hoisting the center of the antenna up somehow. In [W3CT]’s case he’s using a mast which would break the $8 budget, but a tree or building will do just as well.

The video on the construction of this antenna goes into great detail, so if you haven’t built a dipole yet or you’re just getting started on your ham radio journey, it’s a great place to get started. From there we’d recommend checking out an off-center-fed dipole which lets a dipole operate efficiently on multiple bands instead of just one, and for more general ham radio advice without breaking the bank we’d always recommend the $50 Ham series.

The Quansheng UV-K5 is a popular handheld radio. It’s useful out of the box, but also cherished for its modification potential. [OM0ET] purchased one of these capable VHF/UHF radios, but got to hacking—as he wanted to use it as a desktop radio instead!

This might just sound like a simple reshell, but there was actually a bit of extra work involved. Most notably, the Quansheng is designed to be tuned solely by using the keypad. For desktop use, though, that’s actually kind of a pain. Thus, to make life easier, [OM0ET] decided to whip up a little encoder control to handle tuning and other control tasks using an ESP32. This was achieved with help from one [OM0WT] and files for that are on Github. Other tasks involved finding a way to make the keypad work in a new housing, and how to adapt things like the audio and data module and the speaker to their new homes.

Despite the original handheld being much smaller than the case used here, you’d be surprised how tight everything fits in the case. Still, the finished result looks great. We’ve seen some other adaptable and upgradable ham radio gear before, too. Sometimes custom is the way to go! Video after the break.

When all else fails, there’s radio. Hurricane Helene’s path of destruction through Appalachia stripped away every shred of modern infrastructure in some areas, leaving millions of residents with no ability to reach out to family members or call for assistance, and depriving them of any news from the outside world. But radio seems to be carrying the day, with amateur radio operators and commercial broadcasters alike stepping up to the challenge.

On the amateur side, there are stories of operators fixing their downed antennas and breaking out their field day gear to get on the air and start pitching in, with both formal and ad hoc networks passing messages in and out of the affected areas. Critical requests for aid and medication were fielded along with “I’m alright, don’t worry” messages, with reports from the ARRL indicating that Winlink emails sent over the HF bands were a big part of that. Unfortunately, there was controversy too, with reports of local hams being unhappy with unlicensed users clogging up the bands with Baofengs and other cheap radios. Our friend Josh (KI6NAZ) took a good look at the ins and outs of emergency use of the amateur bands, which of course by federal law is completely legal under the conditions. Some people, huh?

Also scoring a win were the commercial broadcasters, especially the local AM stations that managed to stay on the air. WWNC, an AM station out of Nashville, is singled out in this report for the good work they did connecting people through the emergency. As antiquated as it may seem and as irrelevant to most people’s daily lives as it has become, AM radio really proves its mettle when the chips are down. We’ve long been cheerleaders for AM in emergencies, and this has only served to make us more likely to call for the protection of this vital piece of infrastructure.

Windows 10 users, mark your calendars — Microsoft has announced that you’ve got one year to migrate to a more profitable modern operating system. After that, no patches for you! If Microsoft holds true to form, the scope of this “End of Life” will change as the dreaded day draws nearer, especially considering that Windows 10 still holds almost 63% of the Windows desktop market. Will the EOL announcement inspire all those people to migrate? Given a non-trivial fraction of users are still sticking it out with Windows 7, we wouldn’t hold our breath.

Speaking of Microsoft, for as much as they’re the company you love to hate, you’ve got to hand it to them for one product: Microsoft Flight Simulator. It seems like Flight Simulator has been around almost since the Wright Brothers’ day, going through endless updates to keep up with the state of the art and becoming better and better as the years go by. Streaming all that ultra-detailed terrain information comes at a price, though, to the tune of 81 gigabytes per hour for the upcoming Flight Simulator 2024. Your bandwidth may vary, of course, based on how you set up the game and where you’re virtually flying. But still, that number got us thinking: Would it be cheaper to fly a real plane? A lot of us don’t have explicit data caps on our Internet service, but the ISP still will either throttle your bandwidth or start charging per megabyte after a certain amount. Xfinity, for example, charges $10 for each 50GB block you use after reaching 1.2 TB of data in a month, at least for repeat offenders. So, if you were to settle in for a marathon flight, you’d get to fly for free for about 15 hours, after which each hour would rack up about $20 in extra charges. A single-engine aircraft costs anywhere between $120 and $200 to rent, plus the cost of fuel, so it’s still a better deal to fly Simulator, but not by much.

And finally, we were all witness to a remarkable feat of engineering prowess this week with the successful test flight of a SpaceX Starship followed by catching the returning Super Heavy booster. When we first heard about “Mechazilla” and the idea of catching a booster, we dismissed it as another bit of Elon’s hype, like “full self-driving” or “hyperloops.” But damn if we weren’t wrong! The whole thing was absolutely mesmerizing, and the idea that SpaceX pulled off what’s essentially snagging a 20-story building out of the air on mechanical arms was breathtaking. While the close-up videos of the catch are amazing, they don’t reveal a lot about the engineering behind it. Luckily, we’ve got this video by Ryan Hansen Space of the technology behind the catch, lovingly created in Blender. The work seems to have been done before the test flight and was made with a lot of educated guesses, but given how well the renders match up with the real video of the catch, we’d say Ryan nailed it.