How to create your home radio transmitter with raspberry pi

Have you ever wanted to create your own radio? If so, this tutorial is for you! In this article, we will create our own radio transmitter, based on a Raspberry Pi!

Thanks to this tutorial you will be able to create at home your own small radio station at home. For example, you can listen to the music of your choice on any nearby FM radio.

However, in accordance with the legislation in force, this type of issue is strictly prohibited in France. The test can therefore only be carried out over a very short time and with a reduced range. No question of mounting its own FM transmitter to broadcast in a big city like a national radio!

The accessories needed to create your own radio transmitter with Raspberry Pi
In order to create your own radio transmitter based on Raspberry Pi, you will need a number of software (PiFmRds and Sox), as well as a number of equipment to create your transmitter.

Here are the accessories you will need:
* A Raspberry Pi (you can opt for a Raspberry Pi 3 or a Raspberry Pi Zero W )
* A diet for the Raspberry Pi
* A minimum of 16GB MicroSD card
* A GPIO cable
* Rather than a GPIO cable, you can use copper wire and a soldering iron (not mandatory, but for a job well finished it’s better)

Of course, you will also need a way to control your Raspberry Pi, either keyboard / screen, or remotely via SSH.

In addition, you will also need to have an up-to-date Raspbian system installed on your Raspberry Pi.


Prepare and install the antenna of your radio Raspberry Pi

The first step of our tutorial will be to create and install an antenna on your Raspberry Pi. To do this, we will use a wire that will act as an antenna.
Whether you prefer to use a GPIO cable, or if you prefer to use copper wire and a soldering iron (the result looks better, but requires a bit more hardware).

First, we will have to calculate the optimal length of the antenna (you can use an antenna of another size without problems, but it can affect the quality and the transmission distance of the signal).

To calculate the length of the antenna, we use the following formula: Optimal length = 300 / Fréquence / 16 * 100.

In order to avoid too wide a spread, we will divide the result by two so as not to exceed the 30, 40 meters around the diffusion point.

Warning, the higher this point, the greater the distance. Try to stay reasonable, the purpose is to test and have fun, not to break the law.

In our case, we will use the transmission frequency 107.9, which is the frequency used by default by PiFmRds.
So we get the following calculation: ((300/107.9)/16)*100 = 17,37cm.

Once this length is divided by two, we obtain an antenna of about 8.6 cm, which will be very sufficient.

Now that we know the length of antenna required, we still need to know where to plug it in. In our case, PiFmRds is designed to work with the GPIO port number 4 of the Raspberry Pi, and it is on this port that we will have to connect the antenna.
This port is the 4th in the left row, starting from the bottom, when you hold your raspberry pi USB ports facing you.

Install PiFmRds and Sox to transform the Raspberry Pi into a radio

cd /home/ft 

make

Broadcast radio music with raspberry pi

sox -t mp3 /home/pi/musique.mp3 -t wav - | /home/pi/PiFmRds/src/pi_fm_rds -audio -

sox -t mp3 /path/to/dir/*.mp3 -t wav - | Sudo ./PiFmRds/src/pi_fm_rds -freq 95.4 -ps Toto -audio -

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