After watching this i went out to the shack and set up my am cb. I used a cb hand held with a power supply that i could turn the voltage down on. i transmitted on the low setting on the same channel. It overloaded.I then turned the voltage down and moved the HT around with different distances to the radio and voila. I could hear the mud ducks! Thanks Peter!! VK3TB
I'm SO glad you did this as a follow up another video of yours years ago on this very subject and now it's bang up to date. Radio lovers should know about this. I've been doing it for years just using another AM radio as a beat frequency oscillator. Thank you for doing this!
While other channels are foaming over the new IC-705, VK3YE is turning a paper clip and a broken Elmo doll into a functioning DX SSB pocket transceiver.
I did this as a kid with two radio's. One tuned to a Shortwave SSB station then i tuned another radio over the bands till i got a little carrier and i could hear the SSB. I really can't say if this works with every radio. But i did it a lot when i was 8 years old. Maybe my second radio oscillated or something.
I did this when I was a kid to provide a BFO for my consumer grade shortwave receiver (National Panasonic radio that my uncle brought back from overseas). I did build a 455 kHz BFO but it was very finicky to adjust in both level (thus causing problems with overload) and frequency, and found another transistor radio right next to the case of the NP receiver was easier to use. All that was happening was one of the signals generated within the other transistor radio was on the right frequency to beat with the incoming RF signal or the 455 kHz IF inside the NP receiver, thus detecting SSB and CW. Moving the other transistor radio away from the NP receiver provided the BFO level control necessary to prevent overload under weak signal conditions. :)
Yes you get the other radio local oscillator on the other radio rx frequency and it usually leaks so much you can pick it up, all you need is a carrier for to decode the ssb. On ham radio settups this is called rf gain, you usualy have a controll on fast or slow and also a some way to manually adjust the carrier strength. Doing manual with am, you ged bought side bands, so if you have a busy band, you will get a lot of crap from the other side band
This GE was my very first 40ch CB which was given to me by a neighbour back in very early 80s. Prior to that I was using a 2 ch Sony walkie talkie and taking part in a nightly local net of blind and partially sighted veterans and their other halves and local friends. Such great memories! de M3KXZ
@@johnwest7993 The 60's? No-one remembers the 60's! Anyone who says they remember the 60's wasn't actually there. :D Seriously though, I was doing this in the early to mid 70s.
Your channel isn't much for slick audio-vidio production, but you very often cover interesting RF topics fairly well, and I always base my viewing on the adage, "Content is king."
WOOOOW! This Is Something magical, RADIO Is Magical !
2 ปีที่แล้ว +2
Yes but the right way is to generate the carrier at the last IF frequency. (450-460khz) so you do not cause any unwanted interference. And I think that building a small 455khz bfo is cheaper and simpler that a digital antenna analyser.
I used to do something similar when I was a kid and wanted to listen to 40M SSB. I had another radio with a strong LO, and just put it next to the first radio and tuned it 455khz away. Worked great until I eventually got an FRG-7
@@vk3ye I knew I'd get it wrong 😁, clever idea by adding a carrier near the same signal strength, I wonder if you could do the same thing with a GDO and also on a short wave AM receiver, interesting video Peter I'll wait next time before I leave a comment. Cheers Adam G7CRQ
As a bass player I never use a guitar pick (because it’s illegal) But occasionally I do impersonate a guitarist, for which I do often use a pick I can attest that using a guitar pick to operate the touch screen on your NanoVNA is so much easier than the scroll button
@@MirlitronOne I resemble that joke While I do do reasonable impersonations of a guitarist, I am A bass player. You’ll never catch me playing bass like a frustrated guitarist. I have been called out for playing guitar like a frustrated bass player. Kind of makes me a below average guitarist However, what separates me from all the other below average guitarists out there….. Being a bass player….. I know when *not* to play
Hi Peter, Did you try the nanoVNA on 10.695 MHz or thereabouts? I'm assuming here that even the AM HF CB radios use the frequency generation and IF scheme popularised by designs incorporating PLL chips such as the PLL-02A, where the reference oscillator is 10.240 MHz and is divided by 1024 in the PLL IC to arrive at the 10 kHz reference frequency, and the 10.695 MHz first IF is mixed with the reference oscillator to generate the second IF at 455 kHz. Also: 8:00 Soooo pleased to hear that the gentleman concerned has some basic knowledge of his anatomy and purposes thereof.
Thanks, this is a great video 👍 You will get both side bands, lsb and usb. And you will get it all the time, the carrier is just on the other side off the singnal. In ssb radios you do need to different the two, because there is a thig filter filtering out the carrier and the other side band. You can actually listen on am singnas with ssb, i do that when there is some crap on the band and other side off the am singnal is cleaner, talking about am broadcast. In ham radio radios there is usually a knob lebeld rx gain This is the carrier singnal made to construct the singnal. Yes there is automatic gain control, but you have the option to manually adjust the bottom, in some noisie condition it's makes the rx experience better to put some attention and adjust the rx gain knob to reasonable level In this am to ssb by extra carrier you don't have any automatic control, so weak singnal will have weak audio and strong single will "over modulate" You can actually also transmit with the am radio, the frequency might not be on for the other stations, but if you're loky it is and the other stations won't even notice the you have an extra carrier and sideband in your singnal
Could You also use the IF Frequency of the Radio, with a Signal Generator, doing this? Because then You possibly would not have to change the Frequency of the Signal Generator all the Time when changing Frequencies / Channels on the Radio.. If the Stations are (at least) _somewhat_ on Frequency, so that one is still able to understand what is been said.. CB Radio sounds / is very different in Germany... :D So it is not allways like this... :D :D
I wonder if enough signal would mix in the intermediate frequency if you connected straight to the chassis of the radio and generated the BFO at the intermediate frequency. This way it'll do all the channels at once
I suspect a bit of insulated wire from the nanoVNA fed through a hole in the chassis and not connected to anything inside may be better than connecting it direct to the chassis. Even not feeding the wire through the chassis might work, given the poor IF isolation of the typical consumer-grade radio.
@@SpinStar1956 it fixed me. I’m dreadful with a microphone. I tend to think with my mouth open and have a knack of combining humour with brutal honesty that has had me kicked out of places that shouldn’t have let me in in the first place. While I’m not very good at it, I mostly use CW….even in the car….while driving. Surprisingly straight forward and not that more distracting that talking to your passenger
@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan My problem is that I didn't have a good set-up for SSB when I first started in amateur radio (insufficient power, inadequate antenna), and also the tones in my voice were wrong. So I have this *ingrained sense of a morbid distrust* of SSB, i.e. if I fire up the radio on SSB then I have this "I can try answering this DX station, but I won't be surprised if they cannot hear me" thought in the back of my mind. What compounded this distrust was when I got my full call licence, an elderly friend (who'd also sat the upgrade test at the same time as me but failed, sadly, and then went SK before he was mentally prepared to sit the test again) loaned me his TS-520S that he didn't need (he had a nice, new TS-530) and *deliberately* didn't remind me to take the mic with me when I picked it up. He was a dyed-in-the-wool CW operator. :) So I had no choice but to use CW if I wanted to get on 20m, and accordingly the vast majority of QSOs in my early logs are CW. He did loan me the mic later, but I rarely used it except in across-the-suburb rag chews with friends. My early experience was quite frustrating because two of my closest friends of the same age and licence capability seemed to be able to work DX by the bagful using SSB *without* any need for a speech processor. Most of my DX, contesting, etc, is via CW ever since. As I saw in one comment on social media about 15 years ago: _If God wanted us to use SSB he would've given us only one nostril!_ To be fair, though, things have turned around a bit since then. I have owned or do own radios with decent speech compressors, e.g. TS-180S with an IF speech compressor and filtering at both front and tail ends of the IF strip! People tell me when they hear me using that it's as if I have a big linear using VOX - nothing then the S-meter goes *whack* but it's good quality audio. The other radio with a decent compressor is the TS-480HX which can do 200W PEP barefoot. I bought a reasonable audio compressor and Heil mic insert (as a kit) for the FT-817, and people say that sounds really good too.
@@vk2ig there’s something unambiguous bout communicating in CW on the ham bands, while rag chew is a challenge, and it what attracts me most to CW is having a conversation I have a bunch of studio gear, Heil, BeesNeez, Michael Joly microphones, and some nice mic pre’s, compressors and such, but I haven’t gone to the trouble of hooking them up. The other thing that draws me to CW is I can operate at night while everyone is in bed. That said, I’ve had complaints of the solid clack clack clack of some of my old brass keys I’ve acquired.
I remember trying this many many years back. I also started hearing Shortwave radio stations on some channels.
After watching this i went out to the shack and set up my am cb. I used a cb hand held with a power supply that i could turn the voltage down on. i transmitted on the low setting on the same channel. It overloaded.I then turned the voltage down and moved the HT around with different distances to the radio and voila. I could hear the mud ducks! Thanks Peter!! VK3TB
on the old days when we did not have SSB radio, we asked other stations to transmit on the same frequency in AM to read foreign stations in SSB
That’s amazing. It sounds like it doesn’t even need a clarifier.
I'm SO glad you did this as a follow up another video of yours years ago on this very subject and now it's bang up to date. Radio lovers should know about this. I've been doing it for years just using another AM radio as a beat frequency oscillator. Thank you for doing this!
While other channels are foaming over the new IC-705, VK3YE is turning a paper clip and a broken Elmo doll into a functioning DX SSB pocket transceiver.
Not quite. But I can certainly do things with stock cubes. Stay tuned ...
I did this as a kid with two radio's. One tuned to a Shortwave SSB station then i tuned another radio over the bands till i got a little carrier and i could hear the SSB. I really can't say if this works with every radio. But i did it a lot when i was 8 years old. Maybe my second radio oscillated or something.
I did this when I was a kid to provide a BFO for my consumer grade shortwave receiver (National Panasonic radio that my uncle brought back from overseas). I did build a 455 kHz BFO but it was very finicky to adjust in both level (thus causing problems with overload) and frequency, and found another transistor radio right next to the case of the NP receiver was easier to use.
All that was happening was one of the signals generated within the other transistor radio was on the right frequency to beat with the incoming RF signal or the 455 kHz IF inside the NP receiver, thus detecting SSB and CW. Moving the other transistor radio away from the NP receiver provided the BFO level control necessary to prevent overload under weak signal conditions. :)
Yes it does work, I've demonstrated the process using various portables... always fun 👍
i did it too when i was a kid, using two radios.
Yes you get the other radio local oscillator on the other radio rx frequency and it usually leaks so much you can pick it up, all you need is a carrier for to decode the ssb. On ham radio settups this is called rf gain, you usualy have a controll on fast or slow and also a some way to manually adjust the carrier strength. Doing manual with am, you ged bought side bands, so if you have a busy band, you will get a lot of crap from the other side band
@@kristiangronberg3150 does this work better on some types of radios than others?
This GE was my very first 40ch CB which was given to me by a neighbour back in very early 80s. Prior to that I was using a 2 ch Sony walkie talkie and taking part in a nightly local net of blind and partially sighted veterans and their other halves and local friends. Such great memories!
de M3KXZ
I remember reading about this trick from an old Disk Smith radio handbook. Mid-80s I'd guess. Wow I'm old!
Nah. I was doing this sort of thing in 1960. That's old! :)
@@johnwest7993 The 60's? No-one remembers the 60's! Anyone who says they remember the 60's wasn't actually there. :D
Seriously though, I was doing this in the early to mid 70s.
Your channel isn't much for slick audio-vidio production, but you very often cover interesting RF topics fairly well, and I always base my viewing on the adage, "Content is king."
Your resourcefulness is always impressive! Thanks I will remember this trick 😀👍😎❤️
I used to do it with injecting a bfo signal. Thanks for sharing the art of radio with us.
Wow I have been on CB for over 30 years and never knew this!
Very cool. I did not know this and have a nano vna and an am only radio. Thanks
WOOOOW! This Is Something magical, RADIO Is Magical !
Yes but the right way is to generate the carrier at the last IF frequency. (450-460khz) so you do not cause any unwanted interference.
And I think that building a small 455khz bfo is cheaper and simpler that a digital antenna analyser.
This is very remarkable
I used to do something similar when I was a kid and wanted to listen to 40M SSB. I had another radio with a strong LO, and just put it next to the first radio and tuned it 455khz away. Worked great until I eventually got an FRG-7
I'm going to make a prediction, I'll probably get it wrong 😁 are we talking about beat frequency oscillator (BFO).
I won't be building anything though.
@@vk3ye I knew I'd get it wrong 😁, clever idea by adding a carrier near the same signal strength, I wonder if you could do the same thing with a GDO and also on a short wave AM receiver, interesting video Peter I'll wait next time before I leave a comment. Cheers Adam G7CRQ
You were right in that the nanoVNA is effectively acting as a BFO but at RF instead of IF.
Thanks for the info
Excellent video. Keep it real....
Thanks!
Being doing radio stuff since I was kid. How is it im just now learning this?
As a bass player I never use a guitar pick (because it’s illegal)
But occasionally I do impersonate a guitarist, for which I do often use a pick
I can attest that using a guitar pick to operate the touch screen on your NanoVNA is so much easier than the scroll button
The only bass players that think using a pick is illegal are those who cannot think out of the box (bass player joke).
@@MirlitronOne I resemble that joke
While I do do reasonable impersonations of a guitarist, I am
A bass player. You’ll never catch me playing bass like a frustrated guitarist. I have been called out for playing guitar like a frustrated bass player. Kind of makes me a below average guitarist
However, what separates me from all the other below average guitarists out there…..
Being a bass player…..
I know when *not* to play
Davie504 approves this comment.
@@BentConrod Davie504 needs a slap
Nice tks
So the Nano VNA is transmitting on the same frequency as the CB. Interesting I will have to try this idea. Thank you.
What can't you do with a Nano VNA? I have 2, yep, they make a great sig gen, output is 0 dbm, no modulation, Thanks peter, Barry VK2FP/AG7VC
Hi Peter,
Did you try the nanoVNA on 10.695 MHz or thereabouts? I'm assuming here that even the AM HF CB radios use the frequency generation and IF scheme popularised by designs incorporating PLL chips such as the PLL-02A, where the reference oscillator is 10.240 MHz and is divided by 1024 in the PLL IC to arrive at the 10 kHz reference frequency, and the 10.695 MHz first IF is mixed with the reference oscillator to generate the second IF at 455 kHz.
Also: 8:00 Soooo pleased to hear that the gentleman concerned has some basic knowledge of his anatomy and purposes thereof.
I didn't try it but an interesting experiment. I'd imagine it would need more output to break through for sufficient level.
Never knew about this voodoo magic..
Great, thank you, but what about to TX
Really cool 👍💯⚛
Or you could buy a ssb radio and enjoy ssb to the full. It’ll also be cheaper!😇
looking at comments below, if the am cb has a 455 khz IF, then set the nano VNA to 455 khz, that way it will work on all channels, Barry VK2FP/AG7VC
Thanks, this is a great video 👍
You will get both side bands, lsb and usb. And you will get it all the time, the carrier is just on the other side off the singnal. In ssb radios you do need to different the two, because there is a thig filter filtering out the carrier and the other side band. You can actually listen on am singnas with ssb, i do that when there is some crap on the band and other side off the am singnal is cleaner, talking about am broadcast.
In ham radio radios there is usually a knob lebeld rx gain This is the carrier singnal made to construct the singnal. Yes there is automatic gain control, but you have the option to manually adjust the bottom, in some noisie condition it's makes the rx experience better to put some attention and adjust the rx gain knob to reasonable level
In this am to ssb by extra carrier you don't have any automatic control, so weak singnal will have weak audio and strong single will "over modulate"
You can actually also transmit with the am radio, the frequency might not be on for the other stations, but if you're loky it is and the other stations won't even notice the you have an extra carrier and sideband in your singnal
The least I'll talk on is at least 2950 RCI Ranger or a hr-2510 Uniden opened up into 11 m to USA 465 oh yeah
Could You also use the IF Frequency of the Radio, with a Signal Generator, doing this? Because then You possibly would not have to change the Frequency of the Signal Generator all the Time when changing Frequencies / Channels on the Radio.. If the Stations are (at least) _somewhat_ on Frequency, so that one is still able to understand what is been said..
CB Radio sounds / is very different in Germany... :D So it is not allways like this... :D :D
Yes, IF would work. But may be harder to get sufficient injection in unless you poke a wire inside the CB.
Semoga bermanfaat, salam 73
I wonder if enough signal would mix in the intermediate frequency if you connected straight to the chassis of the radio and generated the BFO at the intermediate frequency. This way it'll do all the channels at once
I suspect a bit of insulated wire from the nanoVNA fed through a hole in the chassis and not connected to anything inside may be better than connecting it direct to the chassis. Even not feeding the wire through the chassis might work, given the poor IF isolation of the typical consumer-grade radio.
Why doesn't the meter work🤷♂️
my nanos in the bin...
What ???? What happened ?
Righto
Verabal frequency oslator
VFO
Fixes the SSB but not what’s initiating the SSB 🤣😂🤣
CW fixes that
@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan Very good point! 👍😉
@@SpinStar1956 it fixed me. I’m dreadful with a microphone. I tend to think with my mouth open and have a knack of combining humour with brutal honesty that has had me kicked out of places that shouldn’t have let me in in the first place.
While I’m not very good at it, I mostly use CW….even in the car….while driving. Surprisingly straight forward and not that more distracting that talking to your passenger
@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan My problem is that I didn't have a good set-up for SSB when I first started in amateur radio (insufficient power, inadequate antenna), and also the tones in my voice were wrong. So I have this *ingrained sense of a morbid distrust* of SSB, i.e. if I fire up the radio on SSB then I have this "I can try answering this DX station, but I won't be surprised if they cannot hear me" thought in the back of my mind.
What compounded this distrust was when I got my full call licence, an elderly friend (who'd also sat the upgrade test at the same time as me but failed, sadly, and then went SK before he was mentally prepared to sit the test again) loaned me his TS-520S that he didn't need (he had a nice, new TS-530) and *deliberately* didn't remind me to take the mic with me when I picked it up. He was a dyed-in-the-wool CW operator. :) So I had no choice but to use CW if I wanted to get on 20m, and accordingly the vast majority of QSOs in my early logs are CW. He did loan me the mic later, but I rarely used it except in across-the-suburb rag chews with friends.
My early experience was quite frustrating because two of my closest friends of the same age and licence capability seemed to be able to work DX by the bagful using SSB *without* any need for a speech processor. Most of my DX, contesting, etc, is via CW ever since. As I saw in one comment on social media about 15 years ago: _If God wanted us to use SSB he would've given us only one nostril!_
To be fair, though, things have turned around a bit since then. I have owned or do own radios with decent speech compressors, e.g. TS-180S with an IF speech compressor and filtering at both front and tail ends of the IF strip! People tell me when they hear me using that it's as if I have a big linear using VOX - nothing then the S-meter goes *whack* but it's good quality audio. The other radio with a decent compressor is the TS-480HX which can do 200W PEP barefoot. I bought a reasonable audio compressor and Heil mic insert (as a kit) for the FT-817, and people say that sounds really good too.
@@vk2ig there’s something unambiguous bout communicating in CW on the ham bands, while rag chew is a challenge, and it what attracts me most to CW is having a conversation
I have a bunch of studio gear, Heil, BeesNeez, Michael Joly microphones, and some nice mic pre’s, compressors and such, but I haven’t gone to the trouble of hooking them up.
The other thing that draws me to CW is I can operate at night while everyone is in bed. That said, I’ve had complaints of the solid clack clack clack of some of my old brass keys I’ve acquired.
Definitely a mudduck radio lol😂
👎