Summary
There are plenty of radios you can buy that pick up MW and SW bands if that’s what you’re into. Or, you can follow [mircemk]’s example, and whip one up yourself instead. The build employs an ESP32 as the brains of the operation. It’s hooked up to a rotary encoder and a small colour TFT screen, which displays an old-school style tuning dial for choosing the desired frequency. This setup is paired with an Si5351—a capable clock generator chip that can deliver just about any frequency from <8KHz up to 150+ MHz on command. There’s naturally a bunch of supporting analog hardware for the radio end of things, plus a NE612 mixer IC and a PAM8403 class D audio amplifier board, hooked up to a small 0.25W speaker for audio output. [mircemk] has set up the rig to act as a simple radio set, or, with the flick of a switch, it can be configured for SDR use with an attached computer. It’s a handsome build, and one that likely proves a pleasant way to browse the MW and SW bands on a rainy afternoon. We’ve looked at other hardware in this category before, too. Video after the break. Nice, I have this comparable device, an ats mini at home https://atsmini.github.io/ No power amplifier on it but I’d guess equally if not more capable, and all digital I was expecting an SDR and Raspberry Pi. Nice to see it’s an analog radio. With an IF out for soundcard/PC/SDRadio. The Dream software for DRM reception might also work with it. It’s beautiful but. Is there a labelmaker shortage of which I was not aware? White rub on letters would have been so much nicer.