131–140 of 196 posts
This would be amazing for backcountry communication - e.g when backpacking with a large group. Is there any way to enable this for iOS?
Decent walkie-talkies are cheap. Cheap enough that I bought some for my kids to play with instead of a single channel garbage radio like I had as a kid. If you really want a cheap programmable radio Yaesu and BaoFeng are the brands most people go with.
how the turntables. Back in the 80s my grandfather (N4MDB RIP) had a ham radio in his car and used something called an "autopatch" which could dial phone numbers. He'd call my grandma and say we were going shopping or whatever. Everybody from the shack could listen in with their radios. He tried to get me interested in ham radio but at the time I was exploring the internet and ham seemed... boring? Overly fussy with…
Yeah those "autopatch" devices were illegal - Ma Bell had rules against connecting any radio to the telephone system. Probably worried about long distance revenue. The portable radios/cord free telephones back then were a bit of a legal gray-zone.
> Yeah those "autopatch" devices were illegal[.]
Hadn’t the Carterfone decision[1] made them legal already in 1968?
> 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.
Turn your Android phone into a garage door opener (with a USB attachment) Turn your Android phone into a laser pointer (with a USB attachment) Turn your Android phone into a bowling ball (by submerging it in resin that is then shaped into a bowling ball)
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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.
Power tool batteries, eg a dewalt 18v drill, allow a max discharge current of around 10 amps. So for a 600 watt hair dryer, you're going to need 3 power tool batteries! Imagine the cost/weight of that!
To make it work without the high cost/weight, you're going to have to blow mostly cold air and hope the user is okay with that.
I always ask myself why no any cellphone producer is making a phone with 2m/70cm capabilities.
Imagine all the data they could collect. I would probably even buy a subscription!
I always ask myself why no any cellphone producer is making a phone with 2m/70cm capabilities.
I know very little about antenna technology, but physics might play a role. 2m/70cm is pretty far away from the few-cm-wavelengths of somewhat modern cellphones (70cm a bit less so). For FM radio, the common workaround was to use the cable of plugged in wired earphones as antenna, but I don't know how well that would work for bands where the transmitters aren't as unbelievably strong as they are for FM radio. And the…
But I think your second point hits the nail on the head - cell phones have enough antennas in them, and asking to add another one at such a low frequency is a great way to get your antenna and QA teams to look for a more sane employer, and to put your EMC compliance partner's kids through college :)
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They exist but they are no-name brands. The phone is crappy, the radio is crappy, and the combo is a big brick. It would be awkward phone with antenna sticking out. The question is why don't handheld radios have Bluetooth and USB-C data (some have USB-C power).
The common workaround for FM radio was to use the wired earphones plugged into the phone as an antenna. But FM radio is usually extremely, unbelievably strong (a lot of hams know that), so YMMV for other bands with much lower power signals.
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…
We can learn a lot of skills that are useless. Coming from a conservative family, I learned to play the violin and piano at a very young age instead of spending time with friends. These are skills I never have any use for and I’d rather just have some better memories from my childhood. Even if learning to play piano was relatively easy — with one weekly lesson over about 6 months it is extremely doable.
Those are sort of the real costs and benefits of learning skills. Easy or hard doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s worth or not worth learning.
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It uses the phone's battery, which is assumed to be something that is already managed.
Maybe it is too early in the morning or I am just an idiot but how do battery powered cars avoid the "spicy pillow" problem where batteries swell up?
Also most drivers won't really use that many charge cycles per day or whatever. I easily use like 90%+ of my phone's battery every day, I'll use up most of my laptop's battery when I'm on the go. Both of these devices often sit at a high state of charge and goose the voltages more to get more juice out of the pack at the expense of how many cycles they're good for. Meanwhile it's not like I'm driving >200mi every day.