Wandering around a well-known DIY store the other day, I saw a Micromark wireless camera receiver in the bargain bin. It was only a tenner, so I had to have it. On getting it home I found it worked perfectly and is actually very sensitive, picking up the local pub's telesender even on its own internal antenna. It has four selectable channels and can even sequentially scan them.

After playing for a while, I decided to tidy it up a bit so I could easily stick it in the car and go snooping. There were a few things that needed doing:

1. Get rid of the big, heavy captive scart lead and fit a pair of phono sockets.

2. The receiver works from a 10v psu, so I needed to drop a couple of volts from my 12vgel-cel.

3. Add an F-socket for an external antenna.

Removing the captive Scart lead left a nice slot for the new F-socket to sit in. A short piece of mini coax connects it to the tuner input, and you can see the old coax sticking up through the hole in the PCB. I drilled two extra holes to take the video and audio signals.

Three 1N4001's in series dropped almost 2v from the 12v supply, presenting the regulators with a more comfortable 10.2v. You can see the cut I've made in the track.

On test. The picture on the LCD is coming from the pub just over the road - sadly it's almost always on ITV or SKY Sports! The horizontal bars are pulse interference from local LAN activity (or something like it).

This is the double quad antenna. These are dead easy to make and have a decent amount of forward gain. Small too.