Bald Yak 17: Adventures in Radio Data Systems
About this episode
In this episode, Onno explores the differences between FM in amateur radio and commercial broadcast radio while working on his Bald Yak project using GNU Radio.
Foundations of Amateur Radio While spending some quality time discovering what I don't know about GNU Radio, I explored the notion of attempting to at least understand a little more about how an FM signal works. Depending on your background, the letters FM mean different things. In amateur radio it's a way to encode information, generally audio, using something called frequency modulation. Outside the hobby, the letters point at commercial broadcast radio. While the two are related, they're not the same thing. In amateur radio use, FM is a single channel of mono-audio, however, in commercial broadcast radio, there's a whole lot more going on, interesting because it gives you ready-made access to a composite signal that's just complicated enough to be challenging without being so complex that you need to spend hours on understanding the thing. In essence, a commercial FM broadcast signal is multiple channels encoded in a specific and documented way. This is helpful, since you can compare the documentation against ready made examples and replicate the process for yourself. In case you're new here, I'm in the process of building a radio system, in software, using GNU Radio in a…
Keywords
- frequency modulation
- mono-audio
- composite signal
- modular system
More episodes of Foundations of Amateur Radio
- You don't need an excuse to make noise!
- What's in an S-unit?
- Where is the spark .. gap?
- Bald Yak 18: Everything Everywhere All at Once?
- Bald Yak 16: How do you decode FM?
- One step forward ... three steps back.
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