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If you insist on using a valve radio and listening to medium-wave stations, you have a problem: the existing broadcasters have only a limited number of records. Here there’s only one remedy, which is to build your own medium-wave transmitter. After that, you can play your own CDs via the radio. The transmitter frequency is stabilised using a 976-kHz ceramic resonator taken from a TV remote control unit. Fine tuning is provided by the trimmer capacitor. If there’s another station in the background, which will probably be weak, you can tune it to a heterodyne null, such as 981 kHz. As an operator of a medium-wave transmitter, that’s your obligation with respect to the frequency allocations. And that’s despite the fact that the range of the transmitter is quite modest. The small ferrite coil in the transmitter couples directly into the ferrite rod antenna in the radio. Medium-Wave Modulator Circuit Diagram   The modulator is designed as an emitter follower that modulates the supply vo...

Unhappy with a headlight modulator I purchased, I decided to make my own. Even though it would be a trivial programming project to use an Arduino Teensy or similar to do this, I decided to do it the “old fashioned” way, using a 555 timer. The 555 is a clever chip; not only will it supply the oscillator for the flashing effect, it has a reset pin that can be used to force the output to a known state (low) when (other circuitry tells it that) it’s dark outside. [ ]