Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mlyle 1614 days ago
Note that, for a given too-short antenna length, it will be better at emitting harmonics than the fundamental.

E.g. a 1m antenna is far below resonant for 1MHz AM, but may be pretty good at emitting any 37, 39, 41MHz ... content.

Of course, we expect that content to have less than 1/40th, of the fundamental, both because of Fourier series expansion of a square wave and because the frequency response of the system rolls off (edges off an ATmega aren't perfect, even before you get the reactance of the breadboard in the way.

A primary reason to add a filter, IMO, is to raise the voltage of the fundamental at the antenna, and therefore get a little more RF out on our desired frequencies.

1 comments

Those are good points. One of the reasons I was thinking of building it was to put it against a tinySA and see what it's putting out.