Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1MachineElf | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking for the inverse. I want an AM/FM tuner that I can stream audio from. It used to be I lived in a place without enough internet connectivity for streaming. Even still, AM/FM radio broadcast still worked. *If only there was a radio tuner that I could attach to a raspberry pi, then stream the audio from it. Bonus points if it lets me record live broadcasts.

* A non-janky solution, like something actually designed for audio.

View on HN

Sorry if I'm missing something, but aren't you asking for literally a radio?

If you want to record, use the 3.5mm "aux" output or RCA outputs and send the audio to a DAW in your computer. Or record to cassette tape like in the old days.

If you want a programmable radio that's otherwise attached to a computer, it seems like this is not hard to DIY with GNU Radio.

You could attach an rtl-sdr to a raspberry pi and locally host a websdr server (https://github.com/jketterl/openwebrx is a good open source one). The rtl-sdr doesn't have a high enough sample rate to cover about half of the commercial fm broadcast spectrum at a time where you can see quickly switch between stations in that portion e.g. 89-94 Mhz. Going to the other half just requires having two different modes and switching between them in the websdr interface.

Or just having two sdr's.

It's possible to solder a wire to a GPIO pin of a Raspberry Pi and use a program to broadcast FM from that. I've done this very thing in the past. I did it with a first gen RPi, but I think the actual code to make this work with other RPi models may have changed. Google is your friend for this.

For me the performance was quite good. I could pick up the music anywhere within ~100 ft from a short 6cm wire soldered to a GPIO pin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com