RF sensing alarm is a device that would alert when it detects a continuous RF transmission that lasts more than 5 minutes. The device would have to be broadband (HF/VHF/UHF), be sensitive enough to detect a 5W transmission from inside the shack using a telescopic antenna, and produce a sound loud enough to alert me anywhere in the house.
The RF sensing alarm would also have to be self-contained, which means without any hookups to my radios. After a bit of reading and thinking, I came up with a solution that meets all the initial objectives. Here's circuit in detail.
The circuit shown above may look scary for some of you, but it is not. It can be broken down into four stages. Let's look at them one at a time. The first stage acts as a RF sensor circuit. It is made of U1C, one of the four operational amplifiers of a LM324 chip, and its associated input circuitry. U1C is used as a voltage comparator. Note that the two U1C inputs (plus and minus) have similar DC circuits connected to them. The plus input has R7, R8 and D3, and the minus input has R6, R10 and D5. In these two circuits, D3 and D4 are partly biased (about 200 mV of forward voltage) in order to better exploit the variation of voltage versus current that the diode produces. This translates into increased RF sensitivity.
More circuit description in detail
