Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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A little interlude while we're waiting for the corn to rise again.
Ever since I was a child, radio has always fascinated me. I built my first crystal radio kit on my 9th birthday and never looked back. Being able to pull sounds out of the air without the direct use of electricity was mind-bending at the time. A few years later, I got myself one of those AM/FM/VHF/UHF/shortwave receivers and looked for stations almost nightly. I hooked a small speaker through the headphone jack and put it under my pillow so as not to wake anyone else up.
On a good night, I could get KDKA out of Pittsburgh and WBZ out of Boston (and they were quite far away), and I would listen to "Theater of the Mind" before falling asleep. I was also able to pick up the audio channels from TV stations out of the USA, and early on Saturday mornings, I would listen to Roger Ramjet before getting out of bed to watch the rest on TV. I spent many wakeful nights listening to Coast to Coast AM, especially when shift work made it impossible to sleep while others in my time zone were sleeping.
I still listen to the radio almost nightly, but now I generally use TuneIn Radio over the internet; the stations come in much clearer. Sometimes I enjoy tuning into small-town AM stations - it's a refreshing change. KWON out of Bartlesville still has a community call-in show where people can buy, sell, and trade stuff, and they even give their phone numbers over the air... so cute.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that today (August 20th) is National Radio Day in the USA. KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the first station granted a commercial license back in 1920. WBZ got theirs in 1921.
Oh and wrt radio, this is the coolest page on the internet (imo):
https://radio.garden/
It's a world map full of little green dots representing radio stations - click on one to listen. Happy National Radio Day!
Ever since I was a child, radio has always fascinated me. I built my first crystal radio kit on my 9th birthday and never looked back. Being able to pull sounds out of the air without the direct use of electricity was mind-bending at the time. A few years later, I got myself one of those AM/FM/VHF/UHF/shortwave receivers and looked for stations almost nightly. I hooked a small speaker through the headphone jack and put it under my pillow so as not to wake anyone else up.
On a good night, I could get KDKA out of Pittsburgh and WBZ out of Boston (and they were quite far away), and I would listen to "Theater of the Mind" before falling asleep. I was also able to pick up the audio channels from TV stations out of the USA, and early on Saturday mornings, I would listen to Roger Ramjet before getting out of bed to watch the rest on TV. I spent many wakeful nights listening to Coast to Coast AM, especially when shift work made it impossible to sleep while others in my time zone were sleeping.
I still listen to the radio almost nightly, but now I generally use TuneIn Radio over the internet; the stations come in much clearer. Sometimes I enjoy tuning into small-town AM stations - it's a refreshing change. KWON out of Bartlesville still has a community call-in show where people can buy, sell, and trade stuff, and they even give their phone numbers over the air... so cute.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that today (August 20th) is National Radio Day in the USA. KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the first station granted a commercial license back in 1920. WBZ got theirs in 1921.
Oh and wrt radio, this is the coolest page on the internet (imo):
https://radio.garden/
It's a world map full of little green dots representing radio stations - click on one to listen. Happy National Radio Day!
Way cool. We have a lot of overlaps.
The biggest problem with building crystal radios from scratch was the transducer. Then the rocket radio became available in the late 1950s:
It was cheap enough that any kid could afford one. That solved the transducer problem as that tiny piezoelectric earpiece was sensitive enough to be used with an otherwise completely homemade radio. We found that by playing around with pencil leads and old razor blades we could create makeshift diode detectors, similar to the traditional cat's whiskers and galena crystals used in early crystal sets. We would wind wire on old toilet paper tubes and made sliders out of old tin cans to serve as tuners. You could use almost any large enough metal object as an antenna. sometimes even a good ground would work. The metal finger stop on a telephone dial made a great antenna.
That rocket radio was a real wonder. It used a germanium diode as a detector, and had a tiny button capacitor with a little ferrite-core tuning coil. Sliding the rocket's nose cone in and out moved the ferrite core in and out of the coil, making a surprisingly good tuner. The little alligator clip attached to whatever you used as an antenna. I used to use my metal bed frame to grab signals from some of the stronger stations. I would feign sleeping until long after my bedtime listening to exotic programming like the "Back to the Bible Broadcast" on WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia, my first exposure to southern hillbilly culture. That little rocket could pull in stations from as far away as Chicago and Nashville and even once from Los Angeles during sunspot season.
Later as a teenager I used my father's Harmon Kardon vacuum tube hi-fi tuner to fill my log book with stations from as far away as Europe. Those small town stations you mentioned were particularly satisfying to add to my list.
Thanks for rekindling old memories.