Direct conversion is all the rage these days. Or Direct conversion to
I/Q quadrature directly into a DSP. A crystal radio is direct conversion
so I guess we are back where we started (except now we have the DSP).

On 11/28/2014 11:42 PM, GCornelius wrote:
On 11/23/2014 09:37 AM, DhiaDuit wrote:
On Sunday, November 23, 2014 4:16:05 AM UTC-6, dxAce wrote:
DhiaDuit wrote:
Gift for Christmas used to be a transistor radio. See that article
at Headline News Stories 24/7 at www.rense.com

I recall my very first radio. It was some sort of crystal set shaped
like a rocket. No battery required. I got it when I was 3-4 years old
(and living in Ft. Wayne, IN). It was some sort of cereal promo as I
recall. That must have been 1956-57.

A few of my friends had them when I was in grade school. Alligator
clip for an antenna connection - I thought it weird that many would
clip it to a heating radiator - and an adjusting rod that must have
been attached to a ferrite core in the antenna coil.

Back in the 1950s my mom and dad gave myself and one of my sisters a
Motorola transistor radio. Those two radios were identical models of
radios. They had a big tuning knob on them and a carrying strap/shoulder
strap. A year or two before that I had ordered a little transistor radio
from a radio company in Kearney, Nebraska. That little radio (I think
it had two transistors in it) wasen't worth a durn for picking up long
distance radio stations. That little (Kearney, Nebraska) radio used to
be advertized in magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Popular Science
and Mechanix Illustrated and Science and Mechanics classifieds ads.
I believe a simple 'foxhole crystal radio would have worked much better.

Interesting that you mention it. I believe the name may have
been Western Radio (later Western Manufacturing).

Turns out, and I just recently found an article about it, that
a member of the Beshore family in Kearney started the operation -
I suppose in their basement or garage - and it grew from there.
It started with the "Tiny Tone" crystal radio in 1933. When
I was very young we lived a block west of the Beshores, probably
the family of one of the brothers mentioned in that article as
being involved in the operation.

If you go to this locatioon (a book index at the local
historical society site),

http://www.bchs.us/buffalo_tales.htm ,

there's a link - see Volume 13, Issue 10 of Buffalo Tales.

It was a few years after we moved away that I started
reading magazines like Popular Science and first saw the
ads, typically in the classified section at the very back.

George