The Hacker RP33 "Autocrat": refurb time

The Hacker brothers were great engineers.

But along the way, they built great equipment, and lost 2 companies.

Seems like the best route to success is to sell rubbish!

KitchenPi: goodbye BBC Radio 4

Things are changing at the BBC

 

...but not necessarily for the better.

 

Radio Caroline North: using the Manx Radio stream

Most of the time I listen to the Radio Caroline album channel.

 

But once a month, Radio Caroline North transmits from the Ross Revenge.

How can you receive these broadcasts if you are not within a reasonable distance of the transmitters?

Radio Caroline: crank up the power!

Its happened, they've upped their power.

 

At last they have a new transmitter offering more power and better audio quality.

So its expected to improve reception, both in Caroline's target area and beyond.

3D Design & Print: bits for my kitchen radio

I wanted to add a BlueTooth transmitter to KitchenPi

At last, a mini-project to exercise my [dubious] 3D design skills.

Acrylic Splashbacks & KitchenPi

Earlier this year we refurbished our kitchen & utility room.

With a new layout, new floor, new sink, a mixture of new cabinet doors and a few completely new kitchen cabinets, we are happy with the end result.

However, the choice of red splashbacks meant we also needed a new enclosure for our internet radio: KitchenPi.

KitchenPi: adding a watchdog

Although KitchenPi has been running well for over two and a half years, I do get the occasional blip.

A recent issue caused the system to fall silent.

But this turned into an opportunity to do a couple of simple software modifications.

Radio Caroline: visiting the Ross Revenge

Over the Easter weekend of 1964, the M.V. Caroline dropped anchor a few miles off the Essex coast and started broadcasting popular music.

A certain 12 year old, super-glued his ear to the family wireless, and within 3 weeks was joined by 7 million other listeners. Within a year, there were over 20 million of us.

Who would have thought that 12 year old would still be listening to Radio Caroline 54 years later?

Radio Caroline on 648kHz: great coverage with just 1kW

When I first heard about Caroline's plans to transmit on the Medium Wave, I was skeptical.

I couldn't see the point in running a community type radio station on just 1kW of power to cover a limited coastal region of East Anglia.

But I've changed my mind   ...Now I get it!

Putting Radio Caroline back on 199 metres

Having refurbished our Bush VHF 54 valve wireless to a point where it is now a working radio, I have discovered that the Medium Wave band is a bit of an electromagnetic desert.

The strongest station in our area is something called Talk Sport, which mostly features two guys talking utter cobblers.

So if this old wireless is going to be more than just a piece of furniture, I need to establish my own radio station.

Caroline on Pirate BBC Essex?

On the 14th August 1967 the UK government introduced the Marine Offences Act in a desperate attempt to stop offshore "Pirate" radio stations.

It was pretty successful as, one-by-one, the stations turned off their transmitters and their staff headed for home.

But Caroline didn't stop, and now on the 50th anniversary of this legislation, Caroline is not only transmitting via the web, but also on the Medium Wave radio band!

Internet Radio example using Gambas cli

Now that I'm taking Gambas command-line programming more seriously, I thought I might rewrite the software on my internet radios.

As mentioned in a recent post, Gambas can be used to write cli programs (command-line interface) as well as the more usual gui (graphical) applications.

So this post just describes the software aspects of this project, while the other design details can be found in earlier posts.

KitchenPi: an internet radio for my kitchen

We needed a radio in the kitchen to replace our Bush DAB/FM portable which has put in good service, although DAB reception in our area has never been great.

As space is at a premium, I wanted the new radio to take up as little space as possible.

So I came up with the idea of building something that would fit under the eye-level kitchen cabinets, behind the decorative molding.

Radio Caroline on the RaspberryPi

This is a simple project to create an internet radio and music box which can be attached to your home stereo amplifier.

It is also an excuse to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Radio Caroline, a station that fueled the British popular music industry in the 1960's.

I'll cover the RaspberryPi details later, but let's start with a history lesson.