OldLance 2 Posted November 19, 2011 Share Posted November 19, 2011 Well I am Old. Made an Oatmeal box crystal radio in the 1950's. Thought Popular Science was nuts (also IT&T) in the 1960's when they made a big old fuss about the possibility of actually seeing video of the person you were on the phone with. Spent a lot of time scrounging elecro-mechanical parts at various city dumps and 'makin' stuff'. Now that my Luddite Season has passed, I have discovered that it might just be pretty cool to program a circuit as opposed to ripping out a few hundred components and starting over just because you want to change a single parameter in the project. Who'da thought it? Oh, and I did a little exceedingly boring aviation wizardry in the meantime. That all means: I am a breadboarding freak. Having tossed all my junk (wives define things differently) and having been away from my shop for several years, I am waiting for my launchpad, fixing to learn a lot about coding, I suspect. Be gentle with me. RobG and zeke 2 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
zeke 693 Posted November 19, 2011 Share Posted November 19, 2011 Welcome OldLance! Sounds like you're our kind of guy! :ugeek: Let's see what kind of trouble you can get into Quote Link to post Share on other sites
zborgerd 62 Posted November 19, 2011 Share Posted November 19, 2011 Welcome! I made a crystal radio as well, but it was in the '80s. No oatmeal box though. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
PentiumPC 119 Posted November 20, 2011 Share Posted November 20, 2011 Welcome! I made a crystal radio as well, but it was in the '80s. No oatmeal box though. Same here.. remembered some huge pink or beige colored ear phone. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
zeke 693 Posted November 21, 2011 Share Posted November 21, 2011 I can still remember making my first crystal radio back in grade 6 using a piece of wood, copper nails, one germanium diode, a 4" dowel with 100 turns of AWG26 enamel wire and that pink piezoelectric crystal earphone. I sure wished that I still had that radio. It sure was cool to lay in bed at night and listen to places a loooooong ways away. The best thing about it was that it required no batteries! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
TopHatHacker 25 Posted November 21, 2011 Share Posted November 21, 2011 ha zeke, i remember laying in bed when i was young too, trying to find the biggest piece of metal i could attach my antenna to.. i think i eventually wore out my enamel coated wire by running that little tuner back and forth Quote Link to post Share on other sites
zeke 693 Posted November 21, 2011 Share Posted November 21, 2011 Yeah, tuning was kind of a pain. I ended up upgrading the tuning on my unit by adding in a variable capacitor. That was the cat's meow. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.