Every machine has its own way of communicating with its operator. Some send status emails, some illuminate, but most of them vibrate and make noise. If it hums happily, that’s usually a good sign, but ...

Radio seems to be an unofficial theme for The Hackaday Prize, with a few wireless frameworks for microcontrollers and software defined radios making their way into the quarterfinal selection.

EE’s electronic test instrument coverage achieved critical mass in the mid-1980s, including a spectrum analyzer story in the August 1986 issue and subsequent August issues into the 1990s and beyond.

The easiest way to envision a spectrum analyzer is to begin with an oscilloscope that plots magnitude versus time. Then swap frequency for time—and voilà—a spectrum analyzer! A gross simplification ...