NOTE: This is an archive of my old blog. Go to http://gonium.net for my current website.

DCF77 Radio Receiver – Filter Signals

Posted by md on September 16, 2009

Broadcast Tower

I live close to the DCF77 radio transmitter, so my signal was always pretty strong and clear. This is of course not the case for everybody :-) Gwen Roelants did run into problems. He writes:

Although your code works (thanks for that!) it looked like it was very sensitive to how the antenna was positioned.
I found that I did receive a signal every second, but that for the longer signals, I sometimes got a short flash interrupting it, causing the library to add 2 seconds instead of one. Since I got such a flash in almost every minute it could take a very long time before a proper sync was found, and because 2 seconds were counted the time would also drift during the time no new signal could be decoded.
I found a rather simple fix for your code that greatly improved the reliability and time to find a correct signal.

I don’t have an Arduino around so I did not test it, but the proposed changes seem to be reasonable. You can find the changes in the Arduino forums. Thanks, Gwen!

The photo was CCed on flickr by Nathan Gibbs.

Tweaking the code 12

Posted by md on April 18, 2007

tweaking.png

Thanks to Lasse Lambrecht, I can release a new version of the DCF77 code – now you can run it on the ATMega168-based Arduinos.

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Arduino DCF77 v0.2 released 14

Posted by md on January 06, 2007

4:57 nixietube clock

The sketch for decoding the time radio signal DCF77 is greatly improved: I use interrupts for handling the signal and a backup timer has been added.

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