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RASPBERRY PI RADIO TRANSMITTER

Research Proposal · March 2018

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.13154.22729

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Rhythm Kr Dasgupta
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 Raspberry Pi FM Radio Transmission Station
Rhythm Kr Dasgupta
Email: rhythmdas0@gmail.com
ABSTRACT:
The FM Transmitter project uses the general clock
output on a Raspberry Pi to produce frequency
modulated radio communication. The Raspberry Pi is
a very useful computer that can be used for many
different things. PiFM station is one of useful device.
PiFM Transmitter play the sound over the air. This
device normally works like real radio station. We can
use this device in real life, suppose in an area where
our phone network as well as internet is not working
to communicate, in those area we can install this
device for communication purpose on the other hand
it’s a low-cost device we can used in our daily life to
communicate in locality.
1. Introduction
A Raspberry Pi FM Radio Transmission station is a
great way to have a cheap affordable always on play
the sound over the air. you can speak into a
microphone and broadcast your voice or pick audio
files on your Raspberry Pi and play them. Please keep
in mind that it’s illegal to interfere with radio
transmissions in some parts of the world. And you
don’t want to mess up radio transmissions used the
emergency services. So consider this an experimental
project, and a learning exercise, rather than
something to use on a regular basis.
I have filed this under the intermediate projects as it
can get a bit sensitive when it comes to file
permissions especially when installing the radio
transmission server. Raspberry Pi has a very low
power consumption to keep it up and running 24/7.
When you transmit music files (.wav or .mp3) on it in
specific frequency its perform very good.
The Raspberry Pi’s broadcast frequency can range
between 1Mhz and 250Mhz, which may interfere
with government bands. We advise that you limit
your transmissions to the standard FM band of
87.5MHz–107.9MHz and always choose a
frequency that’s not already in use, to avoid
interference with licensed broadcasters.
2.Objective
Transmission is simple and light weight torrent
client in comparison with Deluge. On the other
hand, Deluge has more feature but little heavier,
but you won’t feel any extra load on computer as
computers are much faster today.
3. Methodology
The code is built in C, so it’s also a good introduction
to setting up C and building a program on Raspberry
Pi. You can play other audio files as well, but they
must be 16-bit 22050 Hz mono and in the WAV
format only. That might seem like a real limitation
but it really isn’t. All you need is the SoX sound
exchange audio editor which will process
your MP3 file and convert it into the WAV file on-
the-fly.
4.1 Broadcast radio music with raspberry pi board
raspberry pi that is actually meant to generate
spread-spectrum clock signals on the GPIO pins to
output FM Radio energy. This means that all you
need to do to turn the Raspberry-Pi into a
(ridiculously powerful) FM Transmitter is to plug in
a wire as the antenna (as little as 20cm will do) into
GPIO pin 4 and run the code posted below. It
transmits on 100.0 MHz.
Pi-FM-RDS, depends on the sndfile library. To
install this library on Debian-like distributions, for
instance Raspbian, run sudo apt-get install
libsndfile1-dev.
Pi-FM-RDS also depends on the Linux rpi-
mailbox driver, so you need a recent Linux kernel.
The Raspbian releases from August 2015 have this.
Important. The binaries compiled for the
Raspberry Pi 1 are not compatible with the
Raspberry Pi 2/3, and conversely. Always re-
compile when switching models, so do not skip
the make clean step in the instructions below!
Clone the source repository and run make in
the src directory:
https://github.com/rhythmdas/RPiFm-station.git
make clean
make
Then you can just run:
sudo ./pi_fm_rds
This will generate an FM transmission on 107.9
MHz, with default station name (PS), radiotext (RT)
and PI-code, without audio. The radiofrequency
signal is emitted on GPIO 4 (pin 7 on header P1).
The supported formats depend on libsndfile. This
includes WAV and Ogg/Vorbis (among others) but
not MP3. Specify - as the file name to read audio data
on standard input (useful for piping audio into Pi-FM-
RDS, see below).
• -pi specifies the PI-code of the RDS broadcast.
4 hexadecimal digits. Example: -pi FFFF.
• -ps specifies the station name (Program
Service name, PS) of the RDS broadcast. Limit:
8 characters. Example: -ps RASP-PI.
• -rt specifies the radiotext (RT) to be
transmitted. Limit: 64 characters. Example: -
rt 'Hello, world!'.
• -ctl specifies a named pipe (FIFO) to use as a
control channel to change PS and RT at run-
time (see below).
• -ppm specifies your Raspberry Pi's oscillator
error in parts per million (ppm), see below.
By default the PS changes back and forth between Pi-
FmRds and a sequence number, starting
at 00000000. The PS changes around one time per
second.
4.2 Circuit diagram:

You can add monophonic or stereophonic audio by

referencing an audio file as follows:

sudo ./pi_fm_rds -audio sound.wav

To test stereophonic audio, you can try the
file stereo_44100.wav provided.
The more general syntax for running Pi-FM-RDS is
as follows:

pi_fm_rds [-freq freq] [-audio file] [-ppm

ppm_error] [-pi pi_code] [-ps ps_text] [-rt rt_text]
All arguments are optional:

• -freq specifies the carrier frequency (in

MHz). Example: -freq 107.9.
• -audio specifies an audio file to play as
audio. The sample rate does not matter: Pi-
FM-RDS will resample and filter it. If a
stereo file is provided, Pi-FM-RDS will
produce an FM-Stereo signal. Example: - circuit diagram of Pi FM Transmitter
audio sound.wav.
 4.1 How to Run this device
To compile this project use commands below:
sudo apt-get install make gcc g++
make
Then you can use it by typing:
sudo ./fm_transmitter [-f frequency] [-r] filename
WAVE Files
You can open WAVE (.wav) files or read audio data
from stdin, i.e.:
sox star_wars.wav -r 22050 -c 1 -b 16 -t wav - |
sudo ./fm_transmitter -f 100.6 -
USB sound-card
To use a USB sound-card type this:
arecord -D hw:1,0 -c1 -d 0 -r 22050 -f S16_LE | sudo
./fm_transmitter -f 100.6 -
5. Warning and Disclaimer
PiFm is an experimental program, designed only
for experimentation. It is in no way intended to
become a personal media center or a tool to
operate a radio station, or even broadcast sound
to one's own stereo system.
In most countries, transmitting radio waves
without a state-issued license specific to the
transmission modalities (frequency, power,
bandwidth, etc.) is illegal.
Therefore, always connect a shielded transmission
line from the Raspberry Pi directly to a radio
receiver, so as not to emit radio waves. Never use
an antenna.
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Even if you are a licensed amateur radio operator,
using PiFm to transmit radio waves on ham
frequencies without any filtering between the
Raspberry pi and an antenna is most probably illegal
because the square-wave carrier is very rich in
harmonics, so the bandwidth requirements are likely
not met.
6. Conclusion
This is extremely simple hack turns your Raspberry Pi
into a powerful FM transmitter, this hack requires
absolutely minimum requirements: an SD card, a Piece
of Wire and Power source, that's it!
Pi FM Station has powerful range which can easily
cover your home, your office and if you are planning to
do outside activities, such as organized mountain hike,
trip or something else you can take your Pi FM Radio
station with you.
References:
• Matt Richardson and Shawn Wallace. Getting Started
with Raspberry Pi. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2012.
• Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree. Raspberry Pi user
guide. John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
• Justin Ellingwood. A comparative introduction to
freebsd for linux users. DigialOcean, 2015.
• Liguo Yu, Stephen R Schach, Kai Chen, Gillian Z Heller,
and Jeff Offutt. Maintainability of the kernels of open-
source operating systems: A comparison of linux with
freebsd, netbsd, and openbsd. Journal of Systems and
Software, 79(6):807–815, 2006.
• Simon Monk. Raspberry Pi Cookbook. O’Reilly Media,
Inc., 2013.
• John M Chowning. The synthesis of complex audio
spectra by means of frequency modulation. Journal of
the Audio Engineering Society, 21(7):526–534, 1973.
• Timothy L Warner. Hacking Raspberry Pi. Que
Publishing, 2013.
• Christophe Jacquet. FM-RDS transmitter using the
Raspberry Pi’s PWM. 2014. [Online; accessed 12 April
2016].