With a name like HamShield you might think this device will help keep the flies off your hog roast but no, it’s designed to let your Arduino talk to far away people using Amateur radio bands (Coverage: 136-170MHz, 200-260MHz, 400-520MHz).

The HamShield is powered by the RDA 1846S radio transceiver IC, which features a fully integrated FM radio transceiver. The chip has an SDR (software defined radio) core, allowing a wide range of features such as sub-audio CTCSS/CDCSS modes, DTMF encoding and decoding, tail noise elimination, RSSI, squelch, VOX, volumes, and even a very powerful tone encoder and decoder (which the designer suggests may be fast enough for some digital modes if you are creative enough). Both 12.5 KHz or 25 KHz FM channel bandwidth can be selected. The design also allows you to leverage the powerful ADC and filtered PWM output circuitry for digital and audio modes right from your Arduino sketches! There is no requirement for complex software defined radio processing.

While the HamShield is intended for amateur radio use, it could also be used for prototyping new, non-amateur radio technologies in a lab setting. The HamShield includes a custom designed 250 milliwatt amplifier, providing plenty of power for line of sight communications, as well as a high quality output for a variety of linear amplifiers.

The included Arduino library allows the user to control every aspect of the radio. The library handles all communication between the Arduino and the shield, so all you need to do is use the API. Functions for common amateur radio modes, such as morse code, packet radio, SSTV, scanning, white space channel seeking, empty channel detection, and more are also included. The HamShield is currently up for funding on Kickstarter .