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Edit: Question About 5G/WiFi/Bluetooth

 
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nakedfrog said:
Maybe you should get something like this instead?

Click to expand...
What's the point, unless you just want it for the hobby aspect, and to do something with your hands? Nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing to learn inside, except improving soldering skills. Fine for hacking stuff together yourself, but they have robots to do that stuff in the real world. Everything else is just a mystery chip that either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, you replace it, and hope the new one works. There's nothing to inspect or repair.
 
lxskllr said:
What's the point, unless you just want it for the hobby aspect, and to do something with your hands? Nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing to learn inside, except improving soldering skills. Fine for hacking stuff together yourself, but they have robots to do that stuff in the real world. Everything else is just a mystery chip that either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, you replace it, and hope the new one works. There's nothing to inspect or repair.
Click to expand...
Seems more educational than buying the radio he posted and taking it apart to see how it works 🤷‍♀️
Better still would probably be one of those 99-in-1 electronics projects kits or something.
 
nakedfrog said:
Seems more educational than buying the radio he posted and taking it apart to see how it works 🤷‍♀️
Better still would probably be one of those 99-in-1 electronics projects kits or something.
Click to expand...
I had one, the components were in blocks and you just assemble a circuit that way there was of course a booklet with the diagrams.
 
nakedfrog said:
Seems more educational than buying the radio he posted and taking it apart to see how it works 🤷‍♀️
Better still would probably be one of those 99-in-1 electronics projects kits or something.
Click to expand...
Yea, maybe. Depends on his goal I guess. I'm assuming it's for professional development, and the world's moved beyond (am/fm)radios. Blueprints for circuit design are probably available free from somewhere, and that would be more instructive than examining a radio.
 
lxskllr said:
Yea, maybe. Depends on his goal I guess. I'm assuming it's for professional development, and the world's moved beyond (am/fm)radios. Blueprints for circuit design are probably available free from somewhere, and that would be more instructive than examining a radio.
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Ahahhahahhaha


Gizmo? Professional development?

Ahahhahahha
 
You'd be better off trying to find an old Heathkit or something like that. Also lookup ham radio forums/websites that might have instructions on how to build a radio and explain how they work.

Start with a crystal radio, they're super easy to make and don't require much components. I remember making one as a kid.

If you really want to have fun build a marconi spark gap transmitter. That is probably super illegal now days though, but it will quickly have a bunch of radio nerds show up at your house, particularly ones that work for the FCC. They have a cool van though. They might even show you inside!
 
The label "Digital Radio" can cause a lot of confusion. True Digital Radio means a new broadcast / receive system of audio signals DIGITALLY encoded and transmitted. For info, see this Wikipedia article.

en.wikipedia.org

Digital radio - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

As it details, there are many systems around the world and few actual users in most areas. That is quite UNlike the changes to digital TV systems.

What OP linked to appears NOT to be that. It appears to be a normal analog radio receiver that uses digital circuitry for the tuner section covering three analog radio bands, an LCD screen and buttons for the user interface, with extra features like storage of favourite stations, digital recording of analog audio and an MP3 player all implemented using digital technology. So a LOT of that unit is devoted to those added features and a few chips that sit on a circuit board and "tell" you nothing.

IF what OP really wants is to understand how a "normal" radio (AM and / or FM) works, I agree with many above who suggest beginning with simple analog radio circuit kits and discrete components you can identify. Even a modern compact radio contains so many integrated circuit chips that you cannot see and understand what they do unless you understand old radio designs to begin with.
 
Start here:

electronics.howstuffworks.com

How Radio Works

Radio waves are the backbone of nearly all modern media technology, from TV to smartphones and wireless internet. Yet, they're actually a simple technology.
electronics.howstuffworks.com electronics.howstuffworks.com
 
Gizmo j said:
If that's true how can 5G/WiFi/bluetooth work?

Aren't they digital?
Click to expand...

Layer one is still analog. It can be electricity over a wire, light in a fibre, magnetic fields in the air etc. That part is still considered analog, but it's digitized at both ends by chopping up the signal in a certain way to get 1's and 0's out of it.

One way to think of it is if you have a light bulb that you can turn on and off very fast you could send a binary signal to a receiver and that signal is digital, but the light itself is analog.
 
Gizmo j said:
If that's true how can 5G/WiFi/bluetooth work?

Aren't they digital?
Click to expand...
Red Squirrel said:
Layer one is still analog. It can be electricity over a wire, light in a fibre, magnetic fields in the air etc. That part is still considered analog, but it's digitized at both ends by chopping up the signal in a certain way to get 1's and 0's out of it.

One way to think of it is if you have a light bulb that you can turn on and off very fast you could send a binary signal to a receiver and that signal is digital, but the light itself is analog.
Click to expand...
Think of it this way, with an 'analog' (colloquial) signal, you can pick it up with stuff you can build without a computer. WIth a 'digital' (colloquial) signal, you need a computer to pick it up.

In the end, they're all technically analog, we just use different terms because we like to create different labels for stuff, and the 'under the hood' parts are too complicated/unnecessary to know for most normies.
 
Or another view. ALL radio communication is done with an analog basic "carrier wave" of a set frequency. Then an information signal is used to vary that signal in some way - usually by altering the amplitude of the wave. That is AM or Amplitude Modulation. (Other options are to vary the frequency of the carrier slightly (that's Frequency Modulation, or FM) or Phase Modulation (used infrequently, but essential for the Colour signal in older analog colour television).) AM is a bit easier to understand and is widely used. Almost all DIGITAL communication by radio signals is done by modulating the Amplitude of the carrier wave with digital signals.

In AM the frequency of the information signal is much lower than that of the carrier. For example, for an older AM Radio station broadcasting at 1000 KHz (1 MHz) the time for ONE cycle of that carrier wave is 1 millionth of a second (1 µs), while the time for one cycle of an analog audio tone at 1KHz in the middle of normal hearing is 1 millisec (1 ms), or 1000 µs. So over the time of one cycle of the analog information signal at 1 KHz, the amplitude of the thousand cycles of the carrier wave changes smoothly from very small to full amplitude and back to minimum.

But what if the information signal is a digital one? That means the info is not a smoothly varying sine wave. Instead it is a signal that is either full-on of full-off for some specified short time period. If that short time is 10 µs for one bit of data, then we are transmitting digital info as a series of binary bits at the rate of 0.1 Megabits per second or 0.1 Mb/s or 100 Kb/s. Now, we use digital bits to encode whole numbers, often in groups of 8 bits which allows us to encode and send 256 possible whole numbers (from 0 to 255) as a single group of 8 binary bits, and a whole long series of such numbers in groups of 8 bits or one Byte per number. If that data at 0.1 Mb/s is being sent on the original 1 MHz carrier frequency, each binary bit is10 µs long in time and that is 10 cycles of the carrier frequency. Those 10 cycles will have an amplitude of either full or zero for that signal. At the receiving end it is easy for the digital circuits to determine whether each bit is ON or OFF, and small variations from full signal or zero signal due to noise or "static" can be ignored. AFTER that is done, if the original signal was actually a digitally-encoded analog audio signal, the original information can be re-created exactly. But if the original signal was digitally-encoded written alphabetic characters, or some form of video signal, that also can be re-constructed from the digital bits received. There just needs to be some prior agreement on what the original info was and how to re-construct it from the bits.

So the difference is not in the carrier wave system. It is in the type of information used to modulate that carrier wave in order to convey information from transmitter to receiver.
 
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