Boys' Life 1965 Emergency Communications
A page from the January 1965 (when I was a Cub Scout) issue of Boys' Life magazine:
This is basically the same radio as the Cub Scout Crystal Set mentioned yesterday:
https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/11/cub-scout-crystal-set.html
The hard things to get are the Galena crystal - usually these are potted using some low temperature alloy like Wood's Metal. Kinda hard to find that stuff these days. Germanium diodes also hard to find as are 1000 ohm headphone. Also this design using the slider and depending on parasitic capacitance of the coil yields poor results.
Unfortunately as each day goes by it gets harder to find this kind of stuff, and really is there anything worth listening to on AM anyway ? But IF there was an emergency it might be nice to be able to cobble something like this together.
As I blogged on before:
https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/01/alfred-p-morgan.html
That Morgan crystal set was built using a loopstick which I *think* I bought through the mail from Lafayette along with that variable cap. But there are slightly better designs using a transformer type cylindrical coil such as the one from Allied Radio - Knight Kit:
source: https://www.nutsvolts.com/uploads/wygwam/NV_1020_Goodsell_Fig-1.jpg
It's too bad that the Boy Scouts didn't go for a slightly better design like the Knight kit (or maybe even just get them from Allied ?). Here is a link to the Knight-kit crystal set manual:
https://crystalradio.net/crystalplans/xximages/allied.doc
One of these days I will have to try building a replica of the Knight-kit crystal set.
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm
This is basically the same radio as the Cub Scout Crystal Set mentioned yesterday:
https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/11/cub-scout-crystal-set.html
The hard things to get are the Galena crystal - usually these are potted using some low temperature alloy like Wood's Metal. Kinda hard to find that stuff these days. Germanium diodes also hard to find as are 1000 ohm headphone. Also this design using the slider and depending on parasitic capacitance of the coil yields poor results.
Unfortunately as each day goes by it gets harder to find this kind of stuff, and really is there anything worth listening to on AM anyway ? But IF there was an emergency it might be nice to be able to cobble something like this together.
As I blogged on before:
https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/01/alfred-p-morgan.html
That Morgan crystal set was built using a loopstick which I *think* I bought through the mail from Lafayette along with that variable cap. But there are slightly better designs using a transformer type cylindrical coil such as the one from Allied Radio - Knight Kit:
source: https://www.nutsvolts.com/uploads/wygwam/NV_1020_Goodsell_Fig-1.jpg
It's too bad that the Boy Scouts didn't go for a slightly better design like the Knight kit (or maybe even just get them from Allied ?). Here is a link to the Knight-kit crystal set manual:
https://crystalradio.net/crystalplans/xximages/allied.doc
One of these days I will have to try building a replica of the Knight-kit crystal set.
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm
