Creating a Radio Time Machine: Software-Defined Radios and Time-Shifted Recordings

Presented at The Circle Of HOPE (2018), July 21, 2018, 7 p.m. (60 minutes).

Since the earliest days of radio transmitting, individuals and organizations have made an effort to record and preserve radio signals in the form of broadcasts and other over-the-air communications, especially those of historical significance. Now low-cost software-defined radios (SDRs) coupled with today's faster memory-enhanced computers allow us to record not just individual signals from one radio station at a time, but an entire broadcast band - a wide swath of frequencies - all at once. Each recording from a particular day and time can easily contain dozens, if not hundreds, of stations broadcasting and communicating simultaneously. Later, via a software-defined radio application, recordings can be tuned and listened to (decoded) as if they were live. This talk will discuss how you can build your own "radio time machine" which supports such virtual time shifts by utilizing an inexpensive ($25-$100) SDR, and also show how you can - for free - virtually "travel" through recent history on radio archivists' preexisting radio time machines.


Presenters:

  • Thomas Witherspoon
    **Thomas Witherspoon** (@SWLingDotCom) is the founder and curator of the Radio Spectrum Archive and the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive. He’s also the founder of the nonprofit organization, Ears To Our World (ETOW), which distributes useful technologies like self-powered radios and DIY flashlights to schools and communities in remote impoverished parts of the world. Thomas has been a passionate supporter of shortwave radio, amateur radio, international broadcasting, and free press for many years, and actively blogs on The SWLing Post, an educational and hobbyist radio website. He holds the amateur radio callsigns K4SWL and M0CYI.

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