Has anyone ever thought about using a Wi-Fi access point to broadcast to other computers directly so that you could have your own “Wi-Fi” radio station, like we do on the AM and FM bands?
Has anyone ever thought about using a Wi-Fi access point to broadcast to other computers directly so that you could have your own “Wi-Fi” radio station, like we do on the AM and FM bands?
I’ve heard that some hobbyists have “hacked” router software to modify the transmission characteristics. Has anyone thought about how to do this for a relatively narrowband application like audio broadcasting? We don’t need to take up a 20 MHz wide chunk of spectrum like 802.11 to transmit an audio program.
I’m curious to know whether anyone has considered this, and what kind of range you could get. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to kick a router into a “radio receiver” mode that would allow you to tune in local broadcasts in your area?
There are wifi receivers, but
I think they’re dedicated clients – units like this:
http://www.radio-now.co.uk/acoustic_energy_wifi_radio.htm
http://www.radio-now.co.uk/the_imp_wi-fi_radio.htm
but I think these are actually dedicated, single purpose PCs with the OS and apps probably on flash memory. From what I’ve seen these are for reception off of a home wifi router so are operating at the network level tcp/ip rather than analog modulated RF. When you think about it, you could do a lot with a mid MHz processor and some RAM and flash and an OS and some simple apps.
Alternate spectrum opportunities are tempting, though, from 13 MHz to 49 MHz to 900 MHz and even down low at 1750 meters. It’s just a matter of figuring out how listeners can tune us in.
Experimental broadcasting for a better tomorrow!
Those Internet radios are very interesting!
And I will probably want to get one… But they are designed to receive streaming audio “broadcasts” from Internet radio stations, like you can do with RealPlayer or MediaPlayer, etc. What I had in mind was more of a point-to-point application, lunching off of the inexpensive Wi-Fi hardware that is available and the cheap processing power we all have sitting on our desktops doing practically nothing most of the time.
You can purchase a Wi-Fi card for $10 on sale. That is a completely functional 2.4 GHz transceiver. What if you could flash that and turn it into a dedicated transmitter or receiver, to be used for local neighborhood broadcasting or receiving? Instead of OFDM, you could probably use QPSK or some other simple and robust modulation that would be suitable for a radio channel. I don’t imagine these stations would go that far, but with a simple PC software radio app that anybody could run on their desktop, they could tune in while working at their computer. I think the range could be a few miles with the right antenna. Possible better than LPAM.
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