Hey guys!

I am the new moderator to this forum. My name is Jeff and I took this on so I can learn from you. I have always had an interest in radio. I built a crystal radio set when I was ten and never looked back. There was always a certain charm for me to think that music and other things were coming to me via the airwaves. I liked the wavering sound of Radio Australia and the BBC coming in. Radio is so much a part of our lives; more so than hifi. I remember listening to my father's Philco; just waiting for the tubes to warm up was better than waiting for ketchup to come out of the bottle.
Oh by the way, I am NH6MA. The charm of radio has never left me.
Let me know how I can serve you better
md

(edit) By the way, I want to talk about early transistor radios too! those sonys led the way!

I want to get an awesome tubed table radio next year. Can we flame the mod in this forum?

[Rob]

Hi Jeff,

Congrats on the moderator position. I fooled around with homebrew xtal radios and tube breadboards at a very young age as well. That was great fun! I remember running the xtal radio into the input of a hi-fi amp. Wow the fidelity was awesome (wide bandwidth).

When I was about 12, I took my original Rocket Radio (wish I had it in the original box today!) and reassembled it in a plastic pill bottle which formed the handle of an umbrella. The crystal earphone and cord would wrap up and stow in the end of the handle and the cap would go on when not in use. The umbrella made a great antenna. I remember standing out front of the YMCA downtown in rainy Vancouver , BC, waiting for my folks to pick me up after swimming practice while keeping dry and listening to one of the powerful local AM stations.

It has been a long while since I listened to AM broadcast radio with a passive crystal receiver, but I never did outgrow playing with tubes and hi-fi amplifiers.

Maybe others will share their crystal radio stories, at least those old enough to know what one was.

Rob

sk,
Wait until I restore my Blaupunkt table top! My first antique find, if you can call the '50s antique. Not as old as some other radios, but it had what I wanted in a table top: Am, Fm, Sw, oh and tubes!

Rob,
Nice idea about a thread!
md

You're the antique electronics guru of the Islands!

Yeah right!
Still trying to remember how to read a schematic
Luckily my cousin is an EE
md

My project after Christmas is to get into my Blaupunkt table top. I hope you guys will be here to steer me in the right directions
thanks,
md

[jt1stcav]

(edit) "By the way, I want to talk about early transistor radios too! those sonys led the way!"

Here's my first transistor radio from when I was 7 or 8...this lil' Sony is almost 40 years old (and still works quite well)!

[Rob]

Very pretty radio! I remember portables like that from my youth.

I saw a reproduction rocket radio for sale at of all places "Cracker Barrel" restaurant! I bought one out of curiosity and could never get it to work! I got hooked on the no batteries blurb on the 1940's style box! It was like $5.

[vintagecollect]

Don't forget Miller, -----pics stir interest of all those in forum. Please post picks & keep us updated of restore, sounds like a great set!!!!

[Markw]

Originally Posted by newtvdude

I saw a reproduction rocket radio for sale at of all places "Cracker Barrel" restaurant! I bought one out of curiosity and could never get it to work! I got hooked on the no batteries blurb on the 1940's style box! It was like $5.

1) A strong local station or two
2) one good sized antenna. RatShack sells a Shortwave antenna kit for $15 that's perfect for this or so but you'll need a fairly large yard in order to string it.

[Chad Hauris]

The ground connection is usually more important than the antenna...needs to be grounded to a cold water pipe or grounding rod driven in the ground.

[Randy Bassham]

Back in the 50's when an AM radio station was running nighttime pattern they would have to have an engineer with a 1st class FCC license at the transmitter. Dad picked up extra money babysitting the local station on Tuesday nights and I'd go with him. I built a Crystal Set and took it with me....MAN setting right under the towers I think that Crystal set would have driven an 8 inch speaker direct. The station had a 4 tower array and when it switched to pattern you had to walk around and take antenna current readings at each tower, you didn't need a flashlight...just take a 2 ft fluorescent tube with you, I thought I was big stuff when I got to walk around the towers and take the readings, that's also where at 10 years old I almost had a heart attack while I was walking through the mowed paths between the towers and flushed a huge covey of quail.

[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.