It was nearly 55 years ago I built my
first crystal radio set. I was four or five at the time and had
discovered a wonderful book in the local library. I had sneaked
into the adult section and stumbled upon a book on making crystal
radio sets that caught my imagination. After much pleading, my
father checked the book out.
It wasn't more than a couple of days later I was pleading again
with my dad to help me build one of the radios I found in the
book. He scrounged all the needed parts and when he wasn't looking
I managed to assemble a working crystal radio from that pile of
parts. Part being able to follow along in the book and part dumb
luck no doubt. My dad was impressed that it worked.
I spent many hours listening to that collection of parts stuck on
a piece of wood using fahnestock clips. And like many others, here
I am today still tinkering away. I guess I had the "knack".
For those who don't know, this short video will tell you pretty
much all you need to know about the "knack" and it isn't the
musical group to which I refer:
cheers, Graham ve3gtc
On 13-06-29 08:27 PM, Tony Volpe wrote:
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LOL = I made my first crystal set when I was
eleven. I did it on my bedroom floor, but first it took me weeks
to buy the parts. The most expensive bit was the brown 500pf
variable with brass vanes. I think that cost two weeks pocket
money. It was 4shillings and ninepence. When it was finished,it
wouldn't work, because I hadn't scraped off the laquer on ???the
coil ends. Once I did that, I got a stack of stations all on top
of one another. I had of course used the low q circuit where you
tap the diode off the top of the coil instead of from a tap a
few turns down. I had loaded the tuned circuit to the extent
that its selectivity was all ruined. It was a long tome before I
understood why the tuning was so bad, bit I fell asleep many a
night listening in an old WW2 earphone to a jumble of stations.
:))
