Taylorator Makes Mischief on the Airwaves

[Stephen] recently wrote in to share his experiments with using the LimeSDR mini to conduct a bit of piracy on the airwaves, and though we can’t immediately think of a legitimate application for spamming the full FM broadcast band simultaneously, we can’t help but be fascinated by the technique. Called the Taylorator, as it was originally intended to carpet bomb the dial with the collected works of Taylor Swift on every channel, the code makes for some interesting reading if you’re interested in the transmission-side of software defined radio (SDR).

The write-up talks about the logistics of FM modulation, and how quickly the computational demands stack up when you’re trying to push out 100 different audio streams at once. It takes a desktop-class CPU to pull it off in real-time, and eats up nearly 4 GB of RAM.

You could use this project to play a different episode of the Hackaday Podcast on every FM channel at once, but we wouldn’t recommend it. As [Stephen] touches on at the end of the post, this is almost certainly illegal no matter where you happen to live. That said, if you keep the power low enough so as not to broadcast anything beyond your home lab, it’s unlikely anyone will ever find out.