Telamon wrote:
In article ,
D Peter Maus wrote:

Telamon wrote:
In article ,
D Peter Maus wrote:

Damn...that goes back some. My first radio was a Remco crystal set.

From there it was a crystal radio made by Bell Manufacturing in St
Louis under the Futura brand.

Then a Trancel 8 transistor. Followed by an onslaught of AM
transistor radios.

The first shortwave was a Hallicrafters S-53A. Followed in short
order by my grandfather's Hammarlund BC-794 (Super Pro).

The Halli, I gave to a kid who's father I worked with to start his
own swl hobby.

The Super Pro got a recapping, and sits on the desk next to my
RX-350, and an assortment of hundreds of others.


It got out of control pretty fast. And thank God, stayed out of
control.
Me too. Mine was a blue color not black but otherwise looked just like
this one.
http://www.peeblesoriginals.com/vintage/Remco-crystal-radio.jpg

Yep, that was it. Mine was blue, too. Still have it somewhere.


My Dad made a sloping wire antenna out the back window. I could pick up
a number of stations very well with it.

I made some minor mods to it to sharpen up selectivity. I was
kind of surrounded by 50k blowtorches, so it was easy to be overwhelmed
by a single signal. My grandfather showed me how to pad the input to
bring some of that overload under control.


Later on I bought a radio kit with a crystal mounted in a piece of lead
for one contact and it had a Cat's whisker contact for the other side.
You had to find a "hot spot" on the crystal for the radio to work, which
was a spot were the crystal operated as a diode. That made it a
challenge to get it working at first because you had to have the radio
tuned to a station and find the crystal "hot spot" to get anything.


I built one of those in the Cub Scouts. Got tired of it pretty
fast, and went straight to the two tube set in the Lions (or was it
Webelos) handbook. That didn't last too long after my mother ran over it
with the Kirby. I was listening to it at the time. She did a lot of ****
like that, too. She killed more model airplanes than Von Richtofen's.
Average life of a modelling project at my house from the time I opened
the box, was about as long as it would take her to go to the closet and
get out the vacuum cleaner.

The S-53A was too big to get into the beater bar. That's when it
finally ended.

Sounds like you had a rough childhood.



Ummmm....it was less than pleasant, yes.



When I was a kid I used to hook up a high fidelity amplifier and
speakers to a crystal set. With no limit on the bandwidth local stations
sounded great.



I tried that, as well. I didn't have a standalone stereo, or high
fidelity mono, system. But I did have a portable phonograph by Travler.
I put the headphone output of the crystal set into the top of the volume
pot on the phonograph. The impedances were close enough that it worked
pretty well.

Of course that was when stations were required to maintain a pretty
high standard of performance, and bandwith was 50-15k. That made a huge
difference.

I made a high fidelity tuner out of a table radio a few years later.
Took the audio directly out of the detector of an AA5, and ran it into
the Aux input of an amp out of a Philco hi-fi set. The speaker was a 12"
2 way from Radio Shack in 27cu.ft box I'd built in the basement.

Now THAT was some fine listening.