For our April 3rd JSC Student Intern Ham Radio group project, we decided to build a simple crystal radio. It was based on the design provided by Al Klase N3FRQ, who has a plethora of build information and history about the crystal radio.
3 years ago, Kelvin K5KGH and I (W5OC) had successfully sponsored a DIY Crystal Radio for the Space City STEAM Camp, but this time we decided to make it a bit more enhanced with a larger coil, front panel, terminal posts, and 5 coil taps to optimize the sensitivity. These seemingly small improvements produced huge amounts of unplanned extra manual preparation and outfitting. Our lone intern guinea pig, Mark Castaneda, persevered with the build challenges, but didn’t complete the radio until 4 hours later.
As usual, many thanks to Jeff AB4ME, who thankfully brought his tools to help mount the parts onto the baseboard and panel. And in addition to Kelvin’s help, George AD5CQ stopped by to help with the winding of the 65′ coils.
So there are a bunch of retrospective things to consider if we do decide to roll this out again. At the end, however, Mark was able to receive 3 AM radio stations using the shack’s 80m dipole as an external antenna. Gabriel, had to leave early, but had finished half of the build- to be continued next week. Faheem help gather the group in Christine’s absence. (Thanks!).
Harvesting free energy from the ether is a cool thing. These crystal sets are fascinating.
BTW- Congrats to Mark. During the build, he was notified by his school (University of the Pacific), of winning the “Best Student Scholar” across the whole school. Wow!
