Raspberry PiRate Radio FM Transmitter

In November last year we posted a story showing how a Raspberry Pi could be used to transmit a digital AFSK signal to an RTL-SDR or other radio simply by connecting a wire to a GPIO pin.

Now an rtl-sdr.com reader has written in to let us know that this concept has also been used before to create a 1 – 250 MHz FM transmitter using the Raspberry Pi and a program called PiFM. It uses the same concept of connecting a wire antenna to one of the GPIO pins but modulates the frequency using hardware on the Rpi meant to generate spread spectrum clock signals. It is claimed that it can transmit up to 50m away.

Below we show an example YouTube video of the Raspberry Pi FM radio transmitting to an RTL-SDR running HDSDR.

PiFm & R820T & HDSDR

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Jiří Svítil

He should have use “He´s pirate” rather than Star Wars music

Ed

So I have hackers who are using this to introduce spoken word and music into my living space. Anyone ever encounter this?

sn0w_man

The tutorial isn’t available through this link anymore.

sn0w_man
Dusan

Did anybody tried making 2 way half duplex HAM radio transmitter with raspberry pi ? It should be fairly easy to transmit on 2m ham band, collect and amplify signal from raspberry pi, and than have sdr work on receiving end. Amplification/filter circuit shouldnt brake the bank

IK1PLD

Anybody has already tested the behaviour of the GPIO4 line with the new Raspberry 2, please?
http://youtu.be/-ONIrqeE63Y

Bob

If you do this, scroll up the spectrum and see just how bad the harmonics are from this thing. In fact, if you transmit on the bottom end of the 1.25M band, you’ll find that any CDMA phones in the immediate vicinity will lose their connection to the local tower.

hydranix

Bob is full of bullshit. Tested with 3 CDMA cellular phones and there was no effect on signal, call quality, or wireless data throughput. Was confirmed with a radioshack trunking scanner that there was indeed a broadcast at the supposed frequencies.

jolo

i dont need an Pi for that my good old Nokia have an FM transmitter to….

maverick

your nokia is locked to 87-108