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Simon Field

As seen in: Illumination, Medium, Nature, TechRadar, Information Age, SC Magazine UK, Tech Monitor, Snowflake Blog, Isle of Wight County Press, MusicTech and
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Articles

Filter Design is Simple

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By Simon Field
| Medium
In our last adventure, we built an eight-antenna phased array controller on the RP2350 (Raspberry Pi Pico 2). Our first attempt splattered our signal from DC to daylight (although I stopped looking for it at a gigahertz). So, I built a couple of filters from inductors and capacitors. They cleaned it right up. All the harmonics disappeared down into the noise. Back in the Dawn Ages, we used to calculate filter parameters with a pencil and a slide rule (I'm old). I didn't want to do that.
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Python Radio 54: Phased Arrays

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By Simon Field
| Medium
We saw in our last project that the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 has enough compute power to send a respectably pure sine wave in the AM band. The amateur radio 160-meter band is just above that, from 1.8 MHz to 2.0 MHz. We can safely overclock the RP2350 to 300 MHz without the chip even getting warm, and that gives us enough speed to build a nice sine wave at 2 MHz (if we use 6-bit PWM). We can build a ham radio transmitter using just the RP2350. Now, the 160-meter band has a major problem.
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Chirp Spread Spectrum

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By Simon Field
| Medium
Now that we have an easy way to add fast signal processing routines to MicroPython, we can get ambitious and play with modern spread spectrum techniques without needing special hardware. Beginning as a wartime secret weapon for protecting radio-guided torpedoes from jamming, the actress Hedy Lamarr conceived the idea of spread spectrum communications after seeing the composer George Antheil's synchronized player pianos.
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