About
For my music project, I decided it'd be cool if I could record sounds
that weren't right next to my microphone tethered to my computer.
Say, an upright piano from another location in my house, or
ambient outside noise. I debated about how to make a wireless
microphone. I hit upon the answer suddenly, when I realized
that I had an old wireless phone and its base station. I
figured I might be able to jumper some parts of the base station in
order to "hijack" the audio signal from the phone and rerout it for my
own purposes. After some trial and error, I found the right
leads to jumper, and I promptly accidentally broke them.
After some careful hot-gluing (I didn't own a soldering iron
at this point in time) I finally got it back together and working
properly, and when I fed the jumpered leads into the microphone slot of
my computer, my sound recording software registered noise! I
then figured that the same could work in reverse, with the computer
sending audio signals to the phone. I turned out to be right,
and with some alligator clips and some spliced headphone jacks, I was
able to create a two-way phone that plugs into the computer, just from
an old wireless telephone. I never used it for music
recording, because of the awful audio quality of the phone after it
transmitted the signal, but it was still a really cool project and it
was really cool to achieve success.
I have since re-soldered the project and
removed the hot-glue, so now it's sturdier and looks nicer. I
haven't tried this phone with Skype yet, but I have tried both the
audio recording and the computer sound transmitted to the phone, and
both worked perfectly. I called it the "Wireless Skype Phone"
because I assume that that's what most people would use it for.
It works great, just like a regular phone. I tested it for
100 feet away and it still worked fine. It works through walls,
etc. just like a normal phone, because in essence, it is a normal phone.
The wireless microphone and its base station, side-by-side.
