[kqbx]

Can confirm, it's a great way to get started with radio stuff. Since I live in Europe, I did this with the German DCF77 signal. The frequency is low enough that you can do direct sampling with a 192ksps sound card or with an RP2040.

A nice thing about DCF77 is that once you manage to receive the amplitude modulated signal, you can move onto decoding the slightly more advanced spread-spectrum phase modulated signal, which carries (almost) the same data.

You can start by buying a time signal receiver module, and once you confirm that the module can receive the signal, cut off the ferrite antenna and use it with your own receiver.

Here's a nice article on which I based my own project: https://hal.science/hal-02182845/

Using the same setup (ferrite stick -> discrete transistor amplifier -> RP2040) I also managed to receive the polish AM station at 225kHz.