Goodwatch – A Ham Radio Wristwatch
The GoodWatch is a custom circuit board replacing Casio's calculator watches, supporting amateur radio bands, with a CC430F6147 chip, untuned antenna, POCSAG Receiver, Morse code time beep, and C programming. It lacks Phase Shift Keying and LoRa support but offers modulations customization.
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The GoodWatch is a custom circuit board designed to replace Casio's modern calculator watches, offering support for 70cm and 33cm amateur bands with a three-year battery life. It utilizes the CC430F6147 chip from Texas Instruments and features an untuned random wire antenna integrated into the watchband. The GoodWatch project provides access to its source code, CAD files on GitHub, and detailed documentation on its wiki. Particularly interesting for amateur radio enthusiasts is the POCSAG Receiver applet for receiving 2FSK 1200baud packages from the DAPNET project and a Frequency Counter for identifying nearby transmitter frequencies. The watch can also beep the time in Morse code and is programmed in C around the RF430 chip's CC1100 core. While it does not support Phase Shift Keying or LoRa modulations, it can handle 2FSK and 4FSK modulations with some customization and appropriate test equipment. Additionally, a guide for writing OOK transmitters is available for those interested in exploring further functionalities.
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7 commentsHe even gave me a couple GoodWatch boards. Nice guy!
Side note, as someone who works adjacent to the RF and electronics industry, getting my Ham license was the best thing I could have done to help my CS brain understand the radio and electronics side of what we do. If you’ve ever been curious about getting your license, I highly recommend it!
I still remember that he was W4LMU, and searching on it finds this:
https://www.qsl.net/kq4pl/skeys.htm
His gear was huge, still used vacuum tubes (already retro in the 1980s but he was a Ham), and consumed enough power to run a small neighborhood. He'd be delighted with this.
The PoC||GTFO series, I only have vols 1 & 2, have to be some of the most fascinating books ever published. These and Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment are the most fun in my bookcase.
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