A beauty of a crystal radio

This past weekend during Hammeeting - the largest Ham rally in Norway - I met Per LA9DTA.

He showed me his beautiful crystal radio. It can be seen in the center of the table, with some close-ups below. The design has a printed coil and the whole design is made on a PCB which was shaped as shown in the image. It has a bandswitch and a Soviet low forward voltage Ge diode.

I fell for his design, but with the lack of longwave and medium wave transmitters here I am not sure if I would have much use for it. That is unless I set up one of my transmitter projects to support a radio like this.

I was demonstrating WSPR with my Ultimate 3 transmitter. It can be seen on the right hand side of the table. I wanted some fresh spots as I was giving a presentation later that day entitled "WSPR, JT65, JT9: Digital modes by Nobel laureates K1JT for HF DX with simple equipment". As I was spotted both on 40 m and 80 m I was happy with the performance. Per had also brought his Ultimate 3. Not the modified 11-band version, but just a plain one this time.

Low power longwave transmitter experiment

Many places in the world, low power transmitters in the medium wave band are allowed. I am talking about regulations like in the US where FCC part 15 allows up to 100 mW input.

In Norway we have a particular permission for members of the Norwegian Radio Historic Society to transmit up to 500 mW on 216 kHz in the longwave band. I'm not sure if this is output or input power [it's output power]. The permission is meant to cover a personal collection of historic radios. The frequency is the one used by the main transmitter north of Oslo from 1954-1995 running 200 kW. The frequency is still allocated to Norway, so I guess that is why we may use it this way.

The simplest possible AM transmitter

Here's a design for a 1 MHz amplitude modulated (AM) transmitter. I've been looking a while for something like this, a simple short range AM transmitter for the medium wave band, as I needed something for demonstration of my collection of old radios.

The result is the AM transmitter shown here in an Altoids tin on top of a Radionette Kurér radio. This is a portable tube radio from the 1950's. Several hundred thousands were produced, and it was exported from Norway to 60 countries. It is still popular among collectors.

The transmitter is as simple as it gets. The heart of it is a 1 MHz crystal oscillator in a can. Its 5 Volt power is modulated via an audio transformer, one taken from the output of a transistor amplifier (primary 147 ohms - secondary 3 ohms). I drive the modulator from my cell phone into the low resistance side of the transformer and get good audio when the phone's volume is set to maximum.