A heinous way to listen to FM radio

AM and FM radio are notoriously easy to listen to. With just a couple of passive components such as a diode, inductors, and some capacitors, you can demodulate an AM signal from an antenna. On the other hand, an SDR, or software-defined radio, can be used to easily listen in to AM or FM broadcasts.

Most ordinary metal objects can be used as an antenna to receive an FM broadcast. Given a close enough station, and proper filtering and amplification, things like tin cans, screwdrivers, an antenna made to receive 137.9MHz satellite images, or even a wire can be used to listen to a radio broadcast. In our case, we can listen in to a couple of local FM broadcasts like UMass’ WMUA, or other stations located in Western Mass.

A picture of my wire setup

91.1 WMUA

The SDR takes care of all of the hard parts of this, between filtering the signal, amplifying it, and decoding the wideband FM signal received. If you were to stick any metal object into the center conductor of the SDR, you’ll more likely than not have the ability to hear FM radio.

There are lots of cool things you can do with an SDR besides this, obviously. During an open house here at M5 last semester, we used Ian Butlers HAM radio to broadcast his voice over the amateur band, and picked it up off the satellite reception antenna I made last year, but that’s for another demo.

Philip Baykov

CompE 2027

April 9th, 2026