by Nate Ball
“That’s what has me worried,” I said aloud.
My family all looked up at me in surprise. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. I smiled crookedly and went back to my string beans, which I hated. I shoveled in a heaping forkful and gave my family a big, fake smile. When you stash a secret alien in your room, you’ve got to learn to take a few for the team.
At that moment I knew being in the Young Volunteers for another year was going to be the least of my problems.
I needed to get my roommate off this planet if it was the last thing I did.
And there was a good chance that it just might be.
THE END
Try It Yourself: Building Your Own Radio
In Radio Active, Amp realizes that the clock-gadget he’s got on his wrist provides him with a powerful link back to Erde: his clock gives the exact time on his home planet because it works by quantum entanglement, which Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance.” It’s hard to perform quantum entanglement at home, but we can easily make a one-way radio link that works almost as well. To broadcast your own voice recording or music to a nearby AM radio, only a few components are needed. The first is an audio transformer that will help strengthen the signal you’re going to broadcast. The second is an oscillator, which provides the modulation of the signal, and the broadcasting. Of course you’ll need some wire to hook things up, and a 1/8" audio jack to plug into your music player or phone. Last, you’ll need a 9 V battery and snap, so you can hook up the power.
AM Radio Transmitter Parts List
8 ohm to 1000 ohm Audio Transformer (Radio Shack 273–1380 or equivalent)
1 MHz Oscillator (Digi-Key X101-ND or equivalent)
1/8" audio plug with wires attached (Digi-Key CP-2205-ND or equivalent)
9 V battery snap with wires attached (Digi-Key BS6I-ND or equivalent)
Single-conductor hookup wire, 22 to 28 gauge
A Note Before Getting Started
Get an adult to help you. You may need to use a soldering iron. It’s the best way to connect wires in electronics projects. (You can also carefully twist the wires together, but make sure to twist the wires tightly! Make them into an even “Y” shape, then twist the arms of the Y.) You may also need to strip the insulation off your wires. You’ll need a wire stripping tool to do this. No matter how careful you are, accidents can happen. This is why it’s essential that you have an adult’s help.
1. Hook up the audio plug to the 8 ohm side of the transformer
Most transformers will have a little diagram on the back that says which wires are which. You’ll want to connect the audio plug to the 8 ohm side of the transformer, which is the side that has only 2 wires coming off of it. Twist one wire together with the first wire coming out of the plug’s cable, and the second wire to the second plug cable. There may be a ground connection coming out of the plug cable, too—it will look different from the other two. You don’t have to connect it to anything.
2. Hook up the transformer to the 9 V battery + wire (colored red)
The 9 V battery snap will have two wires coming off—one red and one black. Twist the red wire to one of the end wires on the 1000 ohm side of the transformer. There are three wires coming off on the 1000 ohm side, which is the opposite side from the 8 ohm one where you just wired in the audio plug.
3. Hook up the transformer to the 1 Mhz Oscillator
Take the other end wire on the 1000 ohm side of the transformer and twist it to the top-left pin of the oscillator. You can tell when it’s the top-left one because when you’re looking at the top of the oscillator with its pins going downward, the bottom-left corner (pin 1) is the corner that’s extra square looking. You want the pin above that one. Check out the diagram if you’re not sure.
4. Attach the 9 V battery wire (colored black) to the 1 Mhz Oscillator
Take the black wire coming from your 9 V battery, and twist it onto the bottom-right pin on the oscillator. Remember to keep the extra-square corner as the bottom-left pin when looking down at the top.
5. Hook up the Antenna to the 1 Mhz Oscillator
Last step: cut off a few inches of wire and twist them onto the top-right pin of the oscillator. As a reminder, the middle wire on the transformer and the bottom-left pin of the oscillator are not used in this circuit, so don’t worry that they’re not connected to anything. Now you’re ready to try it!
Using the Transmitter
1. To pick up the signal you’re transmitting, you need an AM radio. Tune the AM radio to 1000. This is the transmission frequency, driven by your 1 MHz Oscillator. Insert the 1/8" plug into your phone or MP3 player and turn up the volume all the way. You may need to turn up the volume on the AM radio pretty high, too.
Turn on a song on your phone or music player, and you should be able to hear it coming through the AM radio! This is a very low-power design, so you might need to start with them only a few inches apart to get it going.
Troubleshooting
Like any project, it might not work perfectly on the first try. Troubleshooting (sometimes called “debugging” for an electronics project like this) is a skill in itself that’s important to learn. Amp needs to do it himself, in fact, to get his quantum link working! Here are some things to try if you’re not hearing the transmission when you power everything up:
• Make sure all your connections are good
When twisting wires together for electrical connections, things might not always be conducting electricity the way you want. Make sure all your connections are twisted very tightly.
• Tune the radio carefully
If the radio isn’t right on 1000 Khz exactly, you probably won’t hear the signal coming through. Try turning the dial slowly back and forth near 1000 Khz.
• Turn up the volume
The transmitter will work best when the MP3 player or phone is at max power, so turn the volume all the way up. Also try turning up the volume on the radio itself.
• Check the connections
If it’s not hooked up right, it definitely won’t work. Compare your circuit to the one shown in the diagram. Do they match exactly? If not, see what you need to fix.
Once your transmitter is working, try recording your own message to call off an alien attack with the voice recorder on your phone, and transmit it to the AM radio! If you’re lucky, the Erdians will hear you and go back home. Good luck!
Excerpt from Alien in My Pocket #4: On Impact!
Read a sneak peek of book four of the Alien in My Pocket series: On Impact!
My legs are spaghetti.
Or socks filled with pancake batter.
Or octopus tentacles.
Or wait: soggy wet beach towels.
That’s it: my legs are soggy octopus tentacles in dress socks filled with spaghetti and pancake batter.
At least that’s what it felt like as I rode my bike to school. I was exhausted.
And Amp was to blame for it all, of course.
He made me miss my bus . . . again! Third time in one week. That was a new record.
My dad drove me to school the first two times, but this time he had a big presentation at work.
So there I was, riding my bike as fast as I could to get to a spelling test that I hadn’t studied for.
My life was a mess. Before my pesky blue alien crash-landed his crummy spaceship into my bedroom, I had a fairly regular life. I played baseball. I got decent grades. I slept eight to ten hours a night. Now I had Amp to worry about. It’s like he travelled a bajillion miles through space and time just to get on my nerves. And oh, yeah, to scout Earth to see if it was worth invading.
My best friend, Olivia, is the only other person who knows about Amp, but she gets to go home at the end of the day.
Here’s some friendly advice: never adopt an alien.
Trust me.
I leaned into the corner of Jacob Drive at full speed and my overly stuffed backpack almost sent me spilling to the pavement.
That’s when I saw the
m up ahead in the middle of the street: a pack of hulking black crows standing around like a gang of misfits waiting to steal my lunch money.
Crows gave me the creeps. I don’t know why, but they made me uneasy. They were bad news . . . with wings.
I leaned over my handlebars, tapped into whatever strength remained in my watery legs, and rode right at them. They squawked and screeched and flew out of my way at the last possible second. “HA!” I shouted. “Out of the street, you turkeys!”
Seconds later, I roared up to the bike racks outside of Reed Elementary School. I felt like a knight returning from a successful battle, ready to give the king good news.
But my smile disappeared almost instantly.
My bike wasn’t slowing down. I squeezed the brake levers on my handlebars. Nothing. I had no brakes! I was going full speed at the first bike rack!
One last thought shot through my brain before impact: THIS IS YOUR FAULT, AMP!
At least I had gotten out of the spelling test.
I was now lying in my bed trying like crazy to find a silver lining.
I wasn’t dead.
And the arm that now hung in a sling wasn’t my throwing arm. If you’re going to dislocate your shoulder, it’s best not to destroy your baseball career at the same time.
The phone rang. I could hear my mom say hello to Coach Lopez. “Apparently, somebody stole his bike brakes,” she explained to him. “I know—weird. But Zack wanted me to mention that it’s his left arm. His throwing arm sustained no damage. He even wrote that down for me. How cute is that?”
“Mom!” I yelled down, and she stopped her conversation and said, “Yes, Zacky?” But I couldn’t think of how to tell her that she wasn’t supposed to tell him that she was reading my instructions without making matters worse! “Nothing.” I sighed, and she went back to talking to Coach Lopez while I propped myself up in my bed.
My head was loopy from the pain pills. I felt mentally jumbled. My brain kept wandering off. My skull felt like it was filled with lemonade and goldfish.
But at least my shoulder didn’t hurt too badly.
I wondered if my little bike rack incident would make the yearbook. That’d be so embarrassing, but also kind of cool if they gave my accident a whole page.
Luckily, classes were about to start when the ambulance finally arrived, but a decent-sized crowd had still hung around. I remember hearing the mix of different voices as I lay wedged between two bikes.
“Is he dead?” someone wondered.
“Who taught that idiot how to ride a bike?”
“Don’t be mean—maybe he’s blind.”
“That’s ridiculous, why would a blind kid ride a bike to school?”
“Who is it?”
“I think it’s Shane Kerr.”
“No, that’s Debbie Finster,” another kid corrected her. He sounded so sure. “Her dad is my dentist.”
“Oh, yeah, that was Debbie for sure,” a girl said sadly. I took particular interest in her use of the past tense.
Principal Luntz was the first adult on the scene. “I should have known it would be you, Zack McGee,” was all he said. He shook his head at me with a frown, as if I had meant to pop my arm bone from its socket just to avoid a spelling quiz.
The ride in the back of an ambulance was pretty what you’d expect: it smelled like medicine, you couldn’t see where you were going, and they didn’t play music. Apparently, a dislocated shoulder doesn’t merit using the siren, which was a little disappointing.
Now here I was, in my bed, my baseball season ruined—and I had a combination lemonade stand and aquarium open for business in my head.
I hadn’t seen the hamster-sized alien who’d made me late in the first place since I got home. He was probably hiding. Amp knew he’d get an earful when he came out. I didn’t remember dozing off, but I must have.
I dreamed of crows chewing the brakes off my bike as I served them cups of cold lemonade poured directly from my nose.
Maybe we should start breaking those big white pain pills in half.
The most annoying thing about living with an alien is the impact it has on your sleep.
Since Amp’s crippled spaceship dented my bedroom wall, getting a good night’s sleep had become about as likely as catching a one-eyed unicorn that burps rainbows and farts lightning.
On the planet Erde, there’s no such thing as sleep. Amp doesn’t understand why I need it. He ignores my complaints about being woken up all the time. It’s like living with a misfiring cuckoo clock.
But thanks to the mind-bending pain pills, I actually had a full night’s rest. Even a four-inch-tall alien on my chest couldn’t wake me before I was ready.
“It’s about time,” Amp said in his strange, high-pitched voice.
“Thanks for your concern about my arm,” I said with a sigh.
“Yes, I see you have a boo-boo.”
“A boo-boo? I almost died!”
“That device on your arm doesn’t indicate a severe injury,” he said, stroking his chin.
“Oh, thanks a lot, Doctor Amp,” I said. “I have a rash I’d like you to take a look at when you’re done.”
“Whoa! Grumpy . . .”
“You’re to blame for all this, you know.”
“Me? What did I do?”
“You made me late for school.”
“How exactly did I do that?”
“Let’s start with the fact that your people are about to invade Earth. That doesn’t help.” I ran my fingers through my hair with the hand from my good arm. “Plus, somebody stole the brake cables on my bike. That’s why I crashed.”
I waited for sympathy, but Amp was silent. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “You look gassy. Please don’t fart right now. I’m not sure I can run away.”
“You rode your bike?” he said in a faraway voice. “You never ride your bike on school days.”
“I know, but I missed the bus. Remember? I was helping you fix a switch on your lame rocketship.”
“But I thought your father was going to drive you!”
“He already drove me twice this week. He said my lateness was a character flaw.”
“You can’t argue with that,” Amp said quietly.
“Whatever. He had a big presentation and couldn’t drive me, and Mom had already left for work.”
Amp was now pacing in front of the alarm clock. I could see it was 11:30 am. Wow, that really was a good night’s sleep!
“I should have told you.”
“Told me what?”
“I borrowed those brake wires when you were at school on Monday.”
“Why on Earth would you do that!?!” I shouted.
“As you know, my landing system didn’t function when I arrived here, so I was trying to fix the breaking flaps on my . . .” His voice trailed off when he saw the look on my face. He backed farther away from me. “Easy now, Zack.” He looked nervous. “Remember, you have a boo-boo.”
“I should have known it was you,” I said between gritted teeth.
With a groan, I started to get up, but pain shot through my shoulder. He instantly disappeared from sight, using one of his alien mind-control abilities.
“Your Jedi tricks don’t work on me anymore, Amp,” I said. It was true; I had been teaching myself how to to deflect his invisible brain signals. At that instant, I saw him scamper across my bookshelf. “I SEE YOU!”
He sort of blinked on and off in my vision as I concentrated on blocking his mind trick. He dove off the bookshelf and ran across the carpet and into the closet.
“You better hide, you little blue headache.”
Honestly, my arm hurt too much to actually chase him. It hurt just to swing my legs off my bed. I stared at the wall, my anger at Amp boiling.
Just then, there was a knock on my door
“Zack, it’s time for your pill, and you have a visitor,” Mom sang through the door.
I knew who the visitor was before the door opened.
“Come on i
n, Olivia,” I groaned.
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About the Author
NATE BALL is the host of the Emmy and Peabody award-winning PBS reality shows Design Squad and Design Squad Nation. An MIT graduate with a Master’s Degree in mechanical engineering, Nate is also the cofounder of Atlas Devices, a two-time All-American pole-vaulter, and a competitive beatboxer. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Credits
Cover art by Macky Pamintuan
Graphic Design by Sean Boggs
Copyright
Alien in My Pocket: Radio Active
Copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ball, Nate.
Radio active / by Nate Ball ; [illustrated by Macky Pamintuan]. — First edition.
pages cm. — (Alien in my pocket)
Summary: Plans go awry when Amp, the four-inch-tall lead scout from the planet Erde, uses parts from fourth-grader Zack’s walkie-talkie to build a quantum radio to alert his commanders to call off the pending invasion of Earth. Includes directions for building a radio.