Collaborate Disseminate
If you read the December 1970 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, you’d be treated to [Len Buckwalter]’s crystal radio build. He called out Modern Radio Labs as the supplier for parts. …read more Continue reading Crystal Radio Kit from the 1970s
During the first half of the 20th century radio technology was booming, albeit restricted by the vacuum tube technology of the time which made radios cumbersome in size and power …read more Continue reading Making a Crystodyne Radio With Zinc Oxide and Cat’s Whiskers
A rite of passage in decades past for the electronics experimenter was the crystal radio. Using very few components and a long wire antenna, such a radio could pick up …read more Continue reading Half Crystal Radio, Half Regenerative Radio
When the cool kids are showing off their SDRs it’s easy to forget that a radio receiver can be very simple indeed. The crystal set is one of the earliest …read more Continue reading The Simplest Way To Spot 2.4GHz RF
Crystal radios can feel magical, given their ability to tune in audio from distant stations with nothing but the energy from the radio signal itself. However, to achieve this feat, they typically rely on a high-impedance earphone to produce an audible sound with very little current. These earphones are hard …read more
If you’ve ever built a crystal radio, there’s something magical about being able to pull voices and music from far away out of thin air. If you haven’t built one, maybe you should while there’s still something on the AM band. Of course, nowadays the equivalent might an SDR. But …read more
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys bubble sort a sample set of amazing hacks from the past week. Who has even used the smart chip from an old credit card as a functional component in their own circuit? This guy. There’s something scientifically devious about the way solder smoke …read more
Perhaps the simplest radio one can build is the crystal radio. Using a diode as a detector, the design generally uses less than 10 components and no battery, getting its power to run from the radio signal itself. [Billy Cheung] decided to build a crystal radio using a rather unconventional …read more
Continue reading Credit Card Chip Used To Make Crystal Radio
The AM broadcast band doesn’t have a lot of mainstream programming on it across much of the United States today. That’s a shame because a lot of kids got their first taste of radio and electronics by building simple crystal radios. [Eric Wrobbel] has a well-done page discussing some of …read more
We’ll admit that [3DSage] has a pretty standard design for a crystal radio. What we liked, though, was the 3D printed chassis with solderless connections. Of course, the working pieces aren’t 3D printed — you need an earphone, a diode, and some wire too. You can see the build and the finished product in the video below.
Winding the coil is going to take awhile, and the tuning is done with the coil and capacitance built into the tuning arrangement so you won’t have to find a variable capacitor for this build. There is a picture of the radio using …read more