Weekend Projects - Super Simple FM Transmitter 

This looks pretty easy and cool to make but when looking for the parts the only thing I can not find is...........a Radio Shack store!!!

*Super Simple FM Transmitter* is the latest addition to our beginner-friendly #WeekendProjects series powered by RadioShack: known as the "Manhattan style" for assembling circuits, use a copper-clad board as the ground plane and a small number of common components to build a local FM transmitter for your favorite tunes.

if someone was wondering and had these questions in mind: where exactly would u attach the antena for longer range? and how to set a station of where the audio would be broadcasted? don't worry i found the answers for you. 1- You can solder the antenna on the "free pad" (video 3:16) where the transistor emitter meets the 10pf capacitor and 470Ohm resistor (yellow, purple, brown, gold) 2- The frequency depends on the inductance of the coil and the value of the 10pf capacitors. The easiest way to adjust the frequency, for example to move away from a strong local broadcaster, is to slightly squeeze or stretch the coil. if you search online for coils and capcitors you will find a fromula that will help u get a frequency (thats what i remember from my electricty class.) hope that helps

The stop motion in this video is so great. What a great creation great job.

I think that without proper explanations all those projects are useless. An explanation of how it does work would be the most important thing

"Head over to your local radio shack" Yeah those don't exist anymore....

20 years ago I purchased an FM transmitter for some several hundred dollars. It was 130 Watt and covered a good radius. We were running pirate radio at the time. I opened it up and noticed it was a copper board with lots of hand soldered through-hole components. To this day I've always wanted to rebuild that and it's what got me started in electronics all those years ago. It looked very much like this, but larger, and there were some amps etc in there too. Very interesting stuff.

Omg. This is what I needed. I searched everywhere but couldn’t find it. Thanks man. This just planted seeds in me for future bigger and amazing projects.

Built this the other day. Suffers from drift a little bit, but works very well and the audio quality is also very good. Mine tuned out to about 108MHz.

this is exactly the kind of videos i want to see from you guys :)

no experience with transmitters, only from the pass 3 months I have been doing research on DIY transmitters and finally this is the only one that works for me. WOW i love it. I didn't have 2 10pf caps so I used 33pf and it still works. thanks.

Very well presented - right to the point. This is a great adjunct to the Make: article, which has a parts list. The Radio Shack PCB listed is copper clad on both sides, so to get it to "snap" apart like in this video, you have to score the line on both sides. Probably the trickiest part of this project is to initially find yourself on the FM receiver, but once found you can "move" the frequency by squeezing or expanding the coil. Thanks for posting this project, Sean!

This is probably the best electronic circuit layout and demonstration I have seen. This gives a list of the tools you need and all the parts and even what they look like. This is something I would most certainly reference to in a college paper or any academic work.

hip hip hurray my first FM transmitter is working,Thank you makezine , but very happy that it worked

You could have explained the reason for each component...

if you're a live musician, and on a low budget, this is a great way to make a set of decent in-ear monitors. the old band i was in used something like this except it involved two walkie talkies with in and output signals. we just used a 1/4" jack to the output on our mixer, and connected that to the input of the walkie. then on the other, we connected a set of headphones to the output of the second walkie. worked great. being a drummer, these are very useful to help out. Great video!

This is so good quality. And relaxing i love the music

Amazing. Its very simple compared to what i've build just recently. Thank you for sharing this videos.

Thanks for the coil winding tip! Have been an Amateur Radio Op since 94. Never seen this until now. John

Great narration and flow! The use of stop motion really helped keep the visuals clean and focused.

I'm pretty sure I have seen this one before, in Make's videos. Alltought it is a cool project, you didn't explain how and why it works and if you'd want to plug an antenna where you would solder it. Greetings from Finland!

Good video. Old schematic. Usually drawn with 27k, 10k vertically as a voltage divider for biasing the transistor. Some might place a variable capacitor in parallel to the coil for tuning, not too big of a value or tuning will be touchy, just pops on the FM radio. You could place the variable cap across the transistor, from collector to emitter. Use of an oscilloscope would show the frequency change in the sine wave. A varactor diode could be used with a .01 cap anywhere a tuning capacitor is used. Tune with a 10 k pot. Add a 10k potentiometer where audio comes in for modulation control if input volume can't be adjusted. Left pot wire to audio source, center pot wire to input cap, (1-33 uf) and right pot wire to ground. Use an on line dipole calculator to figure out how long the vertical antenna needs to be for the frequency you choose. Go crazy and build a field strength meter! Get it close to your transmitter antenna to check radiated power. A needle moves as the indicator. Make sure you don't cause interference with radio, tv,'s, etc..Once I heard somebody talk over a juke box that was unplugged! Ham operator using too much power.

I followed your exact method and sourced everything from Ebay and it was a success first time. I added a 5cm coiled copper for antenna, good quality broadcast up to may be 20 meters!! Thank you !!!

OK, built it. I had zero electronic experience before this, but ordered the parts, followed the directions on the video to the letter, powered it up......and.......IT WORKS!!! I goofed up a couple of things, but I can correct those. It's broadcasting on 105.3 FM. It only has a range of a few feet, so I'm going to add an antenna and see if I can get it to broadcast 15-20 feet. Took me a grand total of about 3 hours, but I had a blast building it. Thanks for this most excellent video!

Many people like this, but would you please provide a practical demo of it. I expected your music to be fired through that receiver the last few seconds :)

Plugging a mono TRS connector into a MP3 player will short out one of the channels, which is not really what you want. Maybe it would be better to join both channels together using mid-valued resistors to a single mono signal and use this as the input to the transmitter

Great beginner's project to get acquainted with hobby radio transmitters. Thanks for sharing.

its the basic key to the most advance transmitters awesome project

Anyone know the background song?

It reminds me about my childhood years in which I used to put an FM wireless microphone next to a speaker and play music and pretend that I have a radio station using a radio cassette as a receiver.

I never expected this to work on the first go making it on breadboard. Thanks for the nice and clear tutorial. Next up, to find out how to tune the range of the thing.

That's a blast from the past. My last local Radio Shack closed down several years ago.

where exactly am i supposed to hook on an antenna? or - could you make a video about this particular fm transmitter or fm transmitters at all, explaining how it works. i guess a lot of people would be intrested to see such video! Big up! Great video!

If I wanted to make this 12 volts, what would I do?

I sure miss Radio Shack in Canada again. Please send Radio Shack back to us. I miss it so much. Awesome little build. Thank you.

That was refreshingly hardcore for a project like this. Manhattan prototyping & all.

Well this is rather strange and awesome... I did just that and even used the same i pod and strangely i dont need the 9 volt battery for it to work it works by just pluging the audio cable nothing else!!

but how does this work?

If love to see more audio projects kinda like this. Love Make videos. Can't wait for more

Awesome project. Thanks.

I feel like this would be good In public, right near another car. Just say "HEY! YOU IN THE RED SHIRT! STOP SMOKING THAT CIGARETTE!"

CAN U PLEASE give me the circuit diagram ... i've project in engineering

i have just watched but not yet worked on it... but from the illustration I KNOW IT WORKS. CONGRATS MUCH FOR GOOD WORK.

Gorgeous job, Congratulations!

I still don't know how this works.

Wow, pirate radio! This will be great to know about for when the zombie apocalypse comes! Great video. I do wish one could control the broadcast frequency range, though...

thank you for the informative video..very simple looking indeed with the step by step guides given..what should I do to improve its transmission capability? replace the inductor with a bigger one or add some additional antenna?

Very well done. Really enjoyed it.

head over to your local radio shack. Hahaha ha sure if you can find one

It's good but you need a VARIABLE capacitor to establish a frequency of transmission. Without it you can fall into a frequency of a local radio station, and will be impossible to get out.

Thank you so much. I truly appreciated your thoughtful video.

I have no experience with radio, circuits, soldering, or anything necessary here really, but once I do a little research and understand all of the things he's using here I'm definitely going to attempt at this!

Rip radio shack

How about a FM receiver?

Manhatten style construction, pretty cool. Thx for sharing

bro,thanks for this great project. my first transmitter and it works:-)

Why didn't you tried on bread board ?

OLD COMMENT SYSTEM!!

Amazing.I'm going to make one. Thanks for your video

Thanks for the complete tutor :D

it is not interesting, interesting to understand how it works

can we just use simple perfboard for things like this.. this is a huge waste of time and effort to cut blocks of copper board.. I'm getting annoyed here

I'll definitely try this once I get my workbench! One question though, any idea what fasteners on your helping hand's clips are called? I've been trying to find that part.

The best content and video I have seen so far

this is a stupid way to make a circuit board.

Clear, concise instructions, and the superb camera work makes the video a pleasure to follow! This is a master class in how a how-to video should be done.

This is awesome...great video

I'd really like to see a video explaining what all the parts of this system do. Eg where is the radio signal emitted from? What's the coil for?

Can you please explain the role of each of the components in the circuit for better understanding

just finished making it working pretty good thanks good video

Really good video, clean work ;) i would like to know if there is a way to add an auxillary port for a standard car fm transmiter ? Thanks in advance :)

Thank you so much! I got mine running which is so awesome. It transmits around 93 MHz. Definitely recommend replacing C4 with a 10-40 pF trimmer.

This is very very simple and awesome, very very good

Can I use a perfboard/dot-pcb or a veroboard?

Successful!! Worked soo good!

Thank you for the nicely done webcast. I am interested to know what piece of The Super Simple FM Transmitter would be modified to change the range? What type of protective casing is applied?

Awesome! What's the potential range and how do you make it stronger? Do you have any control over what channel you want to broadcast on?

i used 22uf 35v electrolytic capacitor. can I use rest of the capacitors of value 100pf?

YOU ARE GOOD MAN

Awesome video

Nice projek 👏

Excellent! Precise! Thorough! My Middle school kids could follow this.

I’m amazed at the world we live in now. Great video

I would like to use a piece of phenolic and some ME squares I have. but that eliminates my ground plane. do you think a piece of buss wire as my ground would effect the circuits performance? great video btw

What is the value of the electrolytic capacitor sir? I do really appreciate the project.thanks

is there a way to have better control over the frequency you transmit? or make it variable so you can change it to whatever is empty in the area

I loved the idea of using the board without the need of printing the circuit!

great project bigboy

That is a great DIY video, but what I want to know is why you used each component and what their purpose is.

Love your videos

thank you so much sir that is the easiest way to build a fm transmitter

Bro Whether it works on breadboard insted of using copper clad board..?

I like the way to PCB without plotting, acid melting, holes drilling !! A sort of mess but works for little circuits.

do you have any link so you can explain the function of each components for the circuit? thank you for your video..

a very good project

Do the voltage on the capacitor matter? like instead of using a 500 volt 0.01mf ceramic capacitor can you use a 50 volt one?

I used 1.5 picoferad caps instead of 1, and im wondering if it will still work.

Yooo ....!!!!!i used enameled copper wire nd transmittr is wrking successfully.... . .thanxx a lot to +make . .my childhood dream of making a fm transmitter is completed by u ...

I built one like this many years ago, and at first I thought it wasn't working. But, once I had access to a frequency counter, I found that it was working quite well but not in the commercial FM band but instead it was too high and was in the aircraft band. Little bit of tuning and it was back to where it should be.

Does adding an antenna come with any requirements such as more voltage ?