Ripples in the Ether

Hellschreiber Clock Display

I don’t know if the guy who created this is a ham (he does say he’s an engineer), but it’s a neat application of some old-school technology. He uses a PIC 12F510 to output a Hellschreiber modulated square wave right to his PC’s sound card line in port. I really get a kick out of seeing one of these “obscure” ham technologies escaping out into the Maker universe. The hardware is dead simple, as you can see in the instructions. If you wanted to try to create a Hellschreiber beacon, I don’t see why you couldn’t just take this same design and plug it into your rig’s sound card interface instead of a PC. I’m already thinking about how cool this would be to try…there’s a good chance I will give it a shot (with an AVR) after I finish up my latest DC transceiver. Watch out for more aliens infecting the bands.