Back in its working days, this tube amplifier by GELOSO was used to amplify a small open-air cinema during warm Italian summer nights, somewhere between the 1970s and the late 1980s.

It was not a hi-fi amplifier, and it was never meant to be one. Its purpose was different: to make voices intelligible, music present, and film soundtracks audible across an outdoor space where people had gathered simply to watch a story unfold together. For spoken dialogue, narration, projected film sound, and the modest sound effects of that era, it was more than enough.

This blog article gathers a series of DIY radio experiments, ranging from early analog detection with Galena crystal receivers to digitally driven AM transmission via Arduino microcontrollers. Inspired by a love for vintage radio sets and low-power communication techniques, this collection explores both the simplicity of early unpowered detection and the elegance of amplitude modulation (AM) implemented in modern embedded systems. These are primarily short-range (QRP) experiments — ideal for educational settings, hobbyists, and radio tinkerers looking to bridge past and present technologies.

This cover design project began as a collaboration with the Italian author, screenwriter and director Alessandra Arcieri, for her cryptic futuristic novel Proiezione Origami. The book was published in 2015 by ilmiolibro self publishing and described as a romanzo cyberzen: a cyberpunk-leaning, dystopian story in which consciousness, code, combat, role-playing logic and spiritual circuitry blur into one unfolding stream.

“Rome, New York, Bombay. What will be the next target?”

Set in a fragmented future, the narrative moves through transcontinental power plays, high-stakes psycho-games and mythic figures recast inside digital landscapes. Its protagonist, Agent Alpha, must decode a layered conspiracy built by a corporate demiurge. Her mission is hidden inside Walt Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric — not simply as a literary reference, but as a kind of hacked anthem for the electrified self.