MidnightScience RX-1 Ultrasonic Receiver
A few weeks back I had the opportunity to see Phil Anderson of MidnightScience talk about one of his new toys – a ultrasonic receiver. What the heck is that? Read on!
Breaking it down to its most basic level, it allows you to listen to things that you can not hear. Our range of hearing as humans is from about 20 to 20,000 cycles per second. That’s on a good day, of course. However, there are all sorts of things that make sound above what we can hear. Bats, for instance, use sound in the 20,000 to 160,000 cycles per second range for echolocation. Mice sing to their babies and their potential mates in the 20,000-30,000 cycles per second area. Insects make all sorts of noises as well.
Phil happened to have some of his Ultra RX-1 kits available and I picked one up. It is a very reasonable $70 and comes with everything you need except the 9V battery.
The build was very non dramatic. The entire project went together very smoothly and I only discovered one problem in the manual that I would have been able to get past had I actually read through the instructions first. Totally my fault and the problem was corrected on my end.
That said, everything went without a hitch and I had a fully functioning ultrasonic receiver about 3 hours later. Most people should be able to do the entire thing in about 2 hours, but I like taking my time along the way to admire my solder job.
At the time I built it, there were really no insects out to listen to, and I have not seen any bats in my neighborhood yet this year. Usually there are a few that show up just after sunset and they fly and swoop between my house and the one next door eating all sorts of mosquitos. They are a lot of fun to watch if you can see them.
Now that the weather is nicer for bugs to be out, I will start taking this thing out at night and recording sounds. Any good ones I get I will stick up here. May even try to shoot some video with the ultrasonic receiver on the audio input.