I thought this was a great picture of Christian demonstrating the crystal radio we finished building last Friday while Kelly was off at her friend Skyler’s birthday party.
We got the kit from The Xtal Set Society. The radio worked great. We had to hook it to the tubing coming out of the hot water heater for a ground and a long extension cord that we ran out into the yard for an antenna, but we got a very strong signal from a local AM radio station. Very impressive. This is actually the second crystal radio we have built. The first one was one of the ones that uses a coil wrapped around a toilet paper tube for tuning. This kit was really more of a soldering lesson than a crystal radio lesson, but it went great. I showed Christian how to solder a part and then handled a couple of the harder joints for him, but he soldered most of it by himself. He read the instructions, populated the board, trimmed the leads, and all that other stuff, too. What a great product. We had such a good time, we have purchased an AM/FM radio kit from another company that is quite a bit more complicated. We are going to put it together this summer.