9.26.2007

He's Dead, Jim...

Damnit, Jim! I'm a Doctor, not a radio man!

Tonight, while trying to take apart my FM/AM switch, I have apparently killed my radio. Everything seemed fine as I was soldering tyhe wires back, checking every four wires for functionality, but when I finished up, my radio no longer produced sound in the AM band, and there are no radio stations coming in on the FM band. I'm sure it can be fixed, but it's most discouraging, to say the least.

I haven't blogged in a little while, so I guess I should say what I've been up to these days.




I finally managed to get my hands on a soldering pump, so I was able to get those knobs off the top of the radio. It was a gigantic pain in the ass, however, but I did manage to get it done after much longer than I had anticipated. Here are some pictures of the offenders.










These little buggers were lots of fun, and took a long time to
wrangle into place, but I eventually got it done. The whole thing looks like an even bigger mess than it was before, but the whole thing still worked.




There's the whole rig in all its glory.

Now, after I finished this, I got a little sidetracked. One of the projects I've been meaning to try out is the AM Transmitter I found on Instructables a little while ago. The problem with that transmitter was that it had no style, so I decided to fix that.

When I was at Active Tech in the morning, I found, along with my sold-a-pult, an extensive selection of Crystal oscillators. This meant that I might have some luck in making a little AM transmitter, and so I picked it up. When I got back to the U of M, I went to the bookstore and grabbed a tin of cinnamon mints and a small pair of cheap headphones for an audio jack.

With all my gear ready to go, I set to work creating my AM transmitter. I soon found out, however, that my oscillator was at too high a frequency to be picked up by any radio. My 2.574 MHz oscillator was no good. It's OK, though, I found a 1 MHz oscillator in the Digikey book, which I'll order on Friday, and hopefully pick it up on Monday. In the mean time, I mocked it up to show what it'd look like.
Sexy, no? The headphone jack will plug into an iPod or other music device and the crystal will generate an amplification modulated signal at 1.ooo MHz, so I can listen to my iPod in my car. Or other places. It's going to be sweet.

The day after I played with my AM transmitter, I tackled, and ultimately buggered up, my AM/FM switch.

Both of these crazy things had to be connected together, and apparently it didn't go so well. Everything seemed to be working until the last four wires that were soldered, but I just couldn't seem to isolate the problem tonight. Tomorrow morning I'll give it another go, so hopefully I'll get things back in gear.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I hope, you will come to the correct decision. Do not despair.