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Everything I know about transmitters I learned from pirates . . .
Posted by: Hilary Martin on May 28, 2007 08:49 PM | Comments (2)
I did Tetsuo Kogawa's electronics workshop on Sunday and made a mini-transmitter.
In the conference room, converted into a workshop in the afternoon, about 10 people were seated around a large table arrayed with soldering irons and bits of wire and electronics thingmys that I know little about. I have built a lot of stuff in my life, and fiddley things with wires are not my specialty. But I had met Tetsuo previously at Deep Wireless and respected his work in the pirate radio scene in Japan and I'll try anything twice, and I had signed up, so I sat down.
A large projected image of Tetsuo presided over the table. There was a delay between his mouth moving on the screen and the sound coming out of the speakers (fixed during the Sunday workshop with the help of skype).
In front of me were wire cutters, a soldering iron, bits of stuff, a colourful diagram, some bits of copper, epoxy. The makings of a perfect afternoon.
Tetsuo started teaching the workshop from Japan. But he turned off his skype mic while he was demonstrating how to construct the transmitter because he needed both hands to work, and was going very fast, so we were lucky that Steven Kelly was there to step in and save us from a group soldering disaster.
I do not really understand how it works, but you solder a bunch of things to a copper plate, transistors and resistors and such and then plug it into a 9 volt battery and magically tune it in to a radio frequency that you have to find on the band by twisting the top of the green component until the radio goes silent (!), and then if you plug it in to a sound source like an mp3 player, it will play the sound on the radio.
And it worked!
And then I broke it in my excitement.
During the closing reception, we used our transmitters to create a bit of lovely cacophony in the conference hall (though I admit I was fiddling with mine up until the last minute), with the assistance of Steven Kelly and Eleanor Stacey, two great sound artists from Halifax.
A grand time was had by all.
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