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Make a Fox Hole Radio

Be great to get today's kids away from their X-boxes and Playstations and get them into
making things like this.
 
Fascinating, I never thought of using a razor blade for a radio, tape editing yes, but I built my crystal set (at 8 or 9 years old) using a crystal detector I bought through an ad in "Popular Something or Another" . Actually you could use a diode. What was really good is that he showed his mistakes and how he reasoned solutions. I was lucky to have had a science teacher who was also a ham operator when I got to high school. I also built telegraph sounders and ran a line over fences to a neighbor's house. If they want kids to learn and be a part of the technical revolution it isn't going to happen in front of a Nintendo.
 
Building something like this not only teaches you about electronics. You also get an idea of what you can do if you put your mind toit. Built my first crystal set at 12, my first 3- tube kit radio a year later, and I was hooked. Later went into radio as a DJ and engineer. Can't believe it all started for me 42 years ago with that simple project....
 
That was the first radio I built when I was 9 years old. I took the lead out of the pencil and lashed it to the saftey pin. I also used litz wire which was easily available at the time. I hooked it with a clip to the finger stop on the rotary telephone for best reception.

I later built a vhf detector with a 1N60A to listen to police. It actually worked quite well as I was not very far from headquarters.

My next project at 10 was to hook a carbon mic out of a telephone in series with the B+ of the oscillator on a big wood stand-up short-wave radio my grandmother gave me. It was my first radio station as I had friends around the neighborhood listen on their parent's Zenith Trans-Oceanic radios. I put up a 100' long-wire antenna that stretched from my second floor bedroom to a tree. I got shocked pretty good a few times. I finally figured I could used a discarded leg of my mothers pantyhose to insulate the element but still let the sound through. Daily experimentation.

It was so much fun discovering the wonders of electricity.
 
speakerman said:
That was the first radio I built when I was 9 years old. I took the lead out of the pencil and lashed it to the saftey pin. I also used litz wire which was easily available at the time. I hooked it with a clip to the finger stop on the rotary telephone for best reception.
<snip>
It was so much fun discovering the wonders of electricity.
Click to expand...

I guess I always used a diode. ;)
Back when ferrite loop antennas and 365pf variable caps were easy to come by, either from an old radio or from an electronics store, it was easy to build a tunable crystal radio. Add a long piece of wire for an antenna, and a water pipe for ground, and you were set.

As a youngster, I remember building a tuner that was entirely passive, with one set of coil/capacitor in parallel to tune the station I wanted, and another in series to reject a stronger one. It taught me a lot about inductors and capacitors, their relation to frequency,Q, etc.

Hooked to a stereo, it sounded great (of course that's before NRSC)!

Kind Regards,
David
 
Where did he use the safety pin? I think they used those to scratch across the coil's surface, for tuning.

I suggested doing a "kid's weekend project" for building a loop antenna ("a gift for your Dad or Grandma, to listen to talk radio with"), but was told that it was stupid to think anyone would want to do anything that doesn't work on an i-pod :D .

(Best part about the project was, it used the foil from a giant chocolate bar for the tuning cap. You had to eat it first!)
 
kenglish said:
(Best part about the project was, it used the foil from a giant chocolate bar for the tuning cap. You had to eat it first!)
Click to expand...

Eat what first.... the chocolate or the foil? ;D ;D ;D

Sorry, I couldn't resist. ;)
 
kenglish said:
Where did he use the safety pin? I think they used those to scratch across the coil's surface, for tuning.
<snip>
Click to expand...

I think the idea is that you use the safety pin as a spring, attached to a pencil lead which 'scratches' across the surface of a razor blade. It doesn't tune, it just finds the most sensitive spot. (No, a little further the the left...Ahhh. That's it!)

Kind Regards,
David
 
Yes this was very cool. Did you notice, he got WFAN? It sounded like Mike and the Mad Dog.......
 
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