I decided to read and write notes to the book Nachrichtentechnik: Eine Einführung für alle Studiengänge by Martin Werner, just to learn the basics of communication technology and to find out how information can be transfered physically. But I thought that this is also a prime opportunity to build a radio and attempt to understand how radios work fundamentally.
I bought a radio kit with a basic soldering iron kit online - pretty much the cheapest versions I could find. The quality was quite bad - the soldering irons would wear off very fast so that soldering was quite hard and worse even: I didn’t know if my soldering wire was made of lead - interestingly leadfree wires have a higher melting point than lead-based wires. So I decided to do a little test and see if the wires melt at 180, 190, 220 and 230 °C - however I didn’t have the right equipment for this and put a tiny piece in the oven of course wrapped in baking paper (though admittedly this was still a very foolish idea) - sadly this didn’t work, as the tiny piece of wire didn’t want to melt, so I wore gloves just in case and always wiped every surface off and wore gloves.
The soldering was a bit guessed as there were no instructions asides from a few images and the . I also didn’t have a multimeter to test if the attached equipment works properly and I didn’t know yet how to use a desoldering pump or how to desolder just with the soldering iron (I’ve now watched videos on the topic and they would’ve helped a lot) - so debugging would’ve been a nightmare, especially since the soldering iron didn’t cooperate
Once everything was done… the radio didn’t turn on when I plugged it in. Well that was quite disappointing! I don’t exactly know what went wrong but I highly suspect that there was a short circuit in a few spots where I had contact between two pins (I thought I removed the contacts). After talking to Grimtail, who has a lot more practical experience in soldering than me, I decided to purchase a new soldering iron with a better tip and buy a new radio plus lead-free soldering wires. So while this attempt may have been a failure, I am very determined for Round 2!
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