Ot: Xtal radio

[Chuck Guzis]

On 11/4/2005 at 10:30 AM woodelf wrote:

>> The second point emphasizes on the "digitalization" issue:
>> in the near future there won't be any analogue AM or FM 
>> transmissions/transmitters any more; even SW band migrates
>> to DRM now - so success won't be reached anymore with the a variable 
>> cap, a coil, a diode, a high-owmed head phone
>> and a reasonable long wire as the antenna. Surely there will be high 
>> integrated circuit modules that decode all the stuff, but
>> electronics hobby is not really interesting when reduced to adding a 
>> battery to a black box.

I hear you!  I was a big SWL addict, but a lot of broadcasters have
discontinued SW broadcast in favor of satellite or internet feeds.  I don't
blame them--SW is capricious at best when it comes to reception, but
deserting the SW broadcast bands is still pretty sad.

At home, since I'm hooked 24/7 to the net, I feed the same stuff (and more)
to the home FM receivers that I used to listen to on SW.  Stereo, yet.

I've still got about a dozen tunnel diodes in my hellbox that I've never
used.  Maybe it's time to build a little receiver using one just for the
heck of it.

Somewhat related, there's an interesting site that talks about building
your own negative-resistance devices from odds and ends:

http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/

Cheers,
Chuck