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Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver

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Re: Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver

#121

Post by 0xEF »

Roark66 wrote: post #101
zeroq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in the market and clicked the link out of curiosity, but yes, I can turn my android phone into a hair dryer if it takes $35 of auxilary equipement.

I'd love to see that actually... Most hair driers are very power hungry. 2kW is not uncommon (at least here where standard voltage is 240V). Achieving substantial amount of drying from a mobile phone battery would be quite a feat of engineering.

Make a small rechargable hair drier for camping/use where outlets are in short supply, and you've got yourself a saleable product, even it it only gives about 5 min of hot air.

Re: Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver

#122

Post by a5c11 »

0xEF wrote: post #120
caseyy wrote: post #117

I wish this was for sale assembled. I know probably about 50% about printing PCBs compared to what I’d need to know, don’t have a 3D printer, and I expect that the firmware and apps probably have at least one or two quirks to take into account. All together, this makes it a big difference in accessibility between being able to buy an assembled item and tinkering oneself. I know tinkering is fun for many people, but h…

> soldering skills It's...not that hard. Unless we're dealing with SMDs, soldering takes about a weekend to learn correctly. Most DIY kits involve through-hole components that you can master after you take a cheap iron to a couple dozen header pins or something equally banal. SMDs, on the other hand, take a bit more finesse, but can be achieved with a wee bit of time and patience. I work in industrial controls and it…

SMDs are not that bad, I always design my boards with SMD components, though I never put smaller than 0805. The chips are even easier to solder once they are fixed at two or three points. I totally abandoned THT elements once I felt confident with surface mounts. I'm doing this with an iron tip, so no BGAs for now (until I turn old toaster oven into a PCB oven).

Re: Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver

#123

Post by f1shy »

londons_explore wrote: post #45

> The radio simply plugs into the USB C port on your Android smartphone and transforms it into a fully-fledged handheld radio transceiver. When I saw the headline I was hoping someone had hacked the qualcomm modem and turned it into a software defined radio.

More accurate: “use your phone as a user interface for a radio module”

Re: Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver

#125

Post by eru »

Roark66 wrote: post #101
zeroq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in the market and clicked the link out of curiosity, but yes, I can turn my android phone into a hair dryer if it takes $35 of auxilary equipement.

I'd love to see that actually... Most hair driers are very power hungry. 2kW is not uncommon (at least here where standard voltage is 240V). Achieving substantial amount of drying from a mobile phone battery would be quite a feat of engineering.

You could run your hairdryer off an internal combustion engine, probably, I guess? And use the Android phone only for some control functions.

Re: Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver

#126

Post by a5c11 »

yownie wrote: post #102
lormayna wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but think about having a mobile that has native integration with APRS or can make voice/packet radio or even DMR. It would be perfect for hiking or adventures. Even better with LORA. Probably the main issue is RF compatibility.

forgive my ignorance here please, but I've read about APRS on and off for a few years and always wondered what I'd need to just transmit some data that would eventually make it's way to the internet. I recently suggested it to a Ornithologist friend doing back country research in South Afrika too. But why are there no regularly recommended cheap hardware solutions that can do this (and or just hobbyist builds using a…

APRS is actually pretty simple protocol. Data is encoded by modulating tones in a human's hearing spectrum, so if you tuned into the APRS frequency with any-purpose scanner (like most Baofengs), you would hear your childhood if you are old enough to remember 52k modems. The sound wave is easy to decode and encode with software. There are plenty of programs (Linux even has dedicated kernel modules) which turn your sound card into a modem, and the missing piece is the radio.

Now, there are different approaches. If your goal is to receive only, you can plug the headphone output of the cheapest Baofeng scanner into the microphone input of your PC, run the software, and you will start seeing messages soon. If you want to transmit, you do the opposite, but you must somehow automatically enable transmission on the radio when the program wants to transmit; there are different methods of doing so, depending on the radio. Basically, you can use anything what can receive and/or transmit audio on 2m bands. Such devices are cheap and easy to buy, so people probably don't bother with assembling a dedicated hardware. Just plug it to the computer.

Re: Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver

#127

Post by londons_explore »

amelius wrote: post #115
londons_explore wrote: post #45

> The radio simply plugs into the USB C port on your Android smartphone and transforms it into a fully-fledged handheld radio transceiver. When I saw the headline I was hoping someone had hacked the qualcomm modem and turned it into a software defined radio.

> When I saw the headline I was hoping someone had hacked the qualcomm modem and turned it into a software defined radio. If anybody could do that, that would be a nightmare I suppose.

Such a thing is clearly possible - various debug and calibration modes for these modems make them output the raw I/Q values needed for a software defined radio.

Unfortunately, in a locked down production phone, those modes are unavailable.

Re: Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver

#129

Post by jumping_frog »

f1shy wrote: post #124

Clickbait: Turn your phone into X: 1) Start with a phone and X-module-w/o-UI. 2) Make an app with the UI 3) put them together

In remote areas with group of people, I have an idea where all phones could linkup like those tesla cars in a mesh-network fashion and then all of them become a loudspeaker.

Re: Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver

#130

Post by 47282847 »

Roark66 wrote: post #101
zeroq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in the market and clicked the link out of curiosity, but yes, I can turn my android phone into a hair dryer if it takes $35 of auxilary equipement.

I'd love to see that actually... Most hair driers are very power hungry. 2kW is not uncommon (at least here where standard voltage is 240V). Achieving substantial amount of drying from a mobile phone battery would be quite a feat of engineering.

Control via USB/Bluetooth (obviously cloud-based), external power source.
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