"So now you should in theory have a working FM transmitter. How do you test it? Well you could build an FM receiver, which would almost be identical, just in reverse. However, I believe this would be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the utility of SDR. With a $20 USB dongle from Amazon and the following tutorial, you can operate your own SDR receiver from your computer."
So no, it's not a radio. The radio is in the dongle, the other part is just an oscillator. So it's more likely about 1/2 million transistor radio or thereabouts (estimate of the # of transistors on the chips in that dongle).
The 'crude mixer / demodulator' can be done with just one transistor, this just isn't that.
It is a radio transmitter (and therefore a radio) regardless of what the TFA says. If you drag our your field strength meter or scanner and tune it to around that band, you're going to get a signal. Probably not a very strong one but it's still there. The big chunk of wire hanging off it is clearly an aerial so it even shows intent of being a radio.
Seeing as it's 49MHz, it'll even show up on analogue baby monitors etc.
"So now you should in theory have a working FM transmitter. How do you test it? Well you could build an FM receiver, which would almost be identical, just in reverse. However, I believe this would be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the utility of SDR. With a $20 USB dongle from Amazon and the following tutorial, you can operate your own SDR receiver from your computer."
So no, it's not a radio. The radio is in the dongle, the other part is just an oscillator. So it's more likely about 1/2 million transistor radio or thereabouts (estimate of the # of transistors on the chips in that dongle).
The 'crude mixer / demodulator' can be done with just one transistor, this just isn't that.