Category Archives: crystal radio

A Modern Take on the Crystal Radio

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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

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Radio and Phone Speaker has Style

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Building a crystal radio isn’t exactly rocket science. Some people who build them go for pushing them technically as far as they can go. Others, like [Billy Cheung], go for style points. The modular radio and phone speaker looks like it came out of the movie Brazil. The metallic gramophone-like speaker horn adds to the appeal and mechanically amplifies the sound, too.

The video (see below) isn’t exactly a how-to, but if you watch to the end there is enough information that you could probably reproduce something at least similar. There are actually several horns. One is made from copper, …read more

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High Impedance Headphones? They’re In The Can!

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[George Trimble] likes to build crystal radios. The original crystal radio builders used high impedance headphones. In modern builds, you are as likely to include a powered amplifier to drive a speaker or normal headphones (which are usually around 4 to 16 ohms).

[George] builds his own speakers using chile cans, some wire, a few magnets, part of a Pepsi can (we are pretty sure someone will leave a comment that Coke cans sound better), and the iron core out of an audio transformer. You can see a very detailed video of the process, below.

There is a little woodworking …read more

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High Performance Crystal Radio

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When you think of a crystal radio, you probably think of something simple maybe built out of household scraps. Not if you are [Chris Wendling]. He recently posted a video (see below) of his high-performance crystal set. He doesn’t take any shortcuts: he has several hundred feet of antenna wire, and uses a cold-water pipe ground system. With no amplifier, a strong signal input is crucial.

The radio has four subsystems: an antenna tuner, a bandpass filter, a detector, and a powered audio output system. He also has a truly enormous system of speakers on the ceiling–this isn’t the crystal …read more

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