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by SuperNinjaCat 2574 days ago
There was an old RPi project released a while ago (PiRadio I think?) which simply involved attaching a jump lead to GPIO pin 4 which allowed the transmission of FM radio signals.

It worked on the principal that the Pi had a stupidly powerful clock and thus could be used as a transmitter.

I did a little experiment where I hooked it up to a yagi antenna and asked my dad to set his cars radio to the frequency I set the software to transmit on and drive around the block to test the distance.

Not only did it work well but I think I heard someone listening to the radio in their home near mine open their front door and yell out "who ever is doing that could you please stop it!" as it was interfering/jamming what they were listening to.

I'm definitely checking this project out though, thanks for posting.

2 comments

"There was an old RPi project..."

Is this it?

http://icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry...

That link looks very familiar but I remember getting the idea from this article first:

https://makezine.com/projects/raspberry-pirate-radio/

Using this disk image for the RPi:

http://cdn.makezine.com/make/pifm/PiRadio.zip

(good times)

EDIT: That link was definitely part of what I was researching at the time (as it is linked in the project article I posted and I remember reading about the limitations regarding stereo output, as well as the line "Most radio receivers want a signal to be an odd multiple of 0.1 MHz to work properly").

This is how some pirate radio stations worked 2-3 years ago.
For dramatic effect...during the experiment I actually did make a windows text-to-voice recording saying something along the lines of "you are listening to <my street name> pirate radio" between the stoner metal songs I had lined up (I was listening to lots of QOTSA at the time to be honest).