[Jeffhs]

I've been fooling around with radio myself since I was eight years old (I'm 51 now, so have been in this racket 43 years), and got a ham radio license eight years later at 16. Back around 1968-70 or so, I had a Remco crystal radio. I lived in suburban Cleveland at the time and was able to hear a 0.5kW local station, five miles or so east of me, on 1330 kHz during daytime, until the station signed off. Tuning around on the Remco radio at night, I could hear one or two Cleveland stations very faintly, but it was still a heck of a thrill being able to hear the 5kW top-40 station from Cleveland on my little crystal set. Neither station was anywhere near strong enough to drive a speaker, but I heard the 1330 station fine using headphones. The Cleveland station was a different story. I heard it all right, but it was so faint it wasn't funny. If I had lived in Parma, Ohio, where all the Cleveland stations had their transmitters and towers (I lived in a smaller city in the next county east of there in 1968), the Remco radio probably would have picked up every major Cleveland AM station with enough gain to easily drive a loudspeaker; in fact, the two 50kW stations in Cleveland at the time probably would have been so loud as to be annoying, as there was no way to reduce the volume of crystal sets.

I like to think that having listened to faint signals on a crystal set prepared me for fishing out weak signals on the amateur radio bands, when I received my first amateur radio license in 1972.


I had a wire antenna outside my home at the time (60+ feet long, from the corner of the house to the rear of the garage, IIRC), but I don't recall what I used for a ground. The radio was in my basement, so I think I must have used a water pipe. I even tried using the metal finger stop on the rotary dial telephone in the kitchen as an antenna; believe it or not, the lashup worked for receiving the local station. Years ago I read somewhere that the telephone company took a very dim view of such practices, but I guess as long as their techs didn't actually see the crystal set hooked up to the stop you could get away with it.