Experimenting with a crystal radio

[G4XWDJim]

You're probably right all of you. Listening to airband on the ground with a proper receiver is pretty boring and despite having the equipment I rarely do it but for a moment whilst reading this thread I thought that listening to the pilot might reduce some of the intense boredom of a flight in an airliner.

Reading AC/HL's link though suggests that some people do it.

[turretslug]

You could argue that a receiver with active devices is cheating in that it is able to neglect strict impedance matching between stages and hit a detector with many volts (particularly a thermionic envelope type) and still achieve plenty of volume and sensitivity. Having no amplification emphasises care in aerial power transfer and preservation. I can see the purist appeal in getting such things right.

On the airband radio front, many pilots are at best ambivalent to such things, maybe worse. One I know said, "I feel no urge to listen to their phone-calls, why do they need to listen to my R/T? They should get a life." Another simply commented, "That lot perpetually hanging around the end of the threshold with their radios and binoculars- next time I go down the range, I'm saving a CBU for them."

Strong stuff, maybe, but sometimes hobbyists can perplex the professionals.

[Radio Wrangler]

The more charitable pilots are sort of pleased that some people are interested in aviation, but are left bemused that those people seem to have got stuck and never progressed to the best bit - they shouldn't be wasting their time freezing their wotsits off at the boundary of an airport, they should be taking flying lessons!

David

[turretslug]

Ooh, I've come across some chippy ones! I just keep my head down.

To be fair, it was an RAF Chief Tech who recognised my interest in technical things and showed me around the training stuff, also making a crystal set with garden aerial (they lived next door), even with painstaking and intermittent results from catswhisker and crystal it seemed like sorcery. Though what H + S would think of an eight year-old boy waving a flexible wave-guide and feed-horn around to show 'scope blips from the traffic on the nearby main road I'm not sure. They'd probably go blue and fall over.

I have often carried hand luggage full of prototype/handbuilt electronics through an airport, never had a problem. I guess that as it is full I am not hiding anything.

Back to crystal radios, they are good fun, at least in the UK we have Radio 4 on LW which is a good signal in most places and worth listening to, 5 Live is also quite good and strong.

[ParcGwyn]

I used to carry a homemade receiver, built in a diecast box, as hand luggage and was only questioned once. The security guard at the X-ray machine in Munich airport just asked what it was and could I turn it on, he then let me carry on.

Dave

GW7ONS