Topband: Razor Blade Detector

[Fred Jensen]

Chris, G4BGM, wrote earlier:

> In one of the comic books doing the rounds among the kids at the forces school in > Germany there was an article about a crystal set using a razor blade and a pencil
> lead as a detector. The other component was a large coil.  I set about constructing
> this basic >receiver  - it didn't work too well.

I guess I'm about 3 years ahead of Chris in age, first licensed in '53
at age 13.  I remember the razor blade detector ... the neighbor kid and
I experimented with it.  If my memory serves me correctly (and it hardly
ever does these days) we found that a Gillette "Blue Blade" which I
think was anodized, and a 4H drafting pencil with the sharpest point we
could manage worked best.  The pressure on the blade made all the
difference.

We lived on So. Central Los Angeles, right on the approach path to LAX. 
On the now known-to-be-mistaken belief that if we could hear a couple of
broadcast stations with the coil as described in Popular Mechanics, more
coil should yield more stations and louder too, we doubled the size of
the coil, and began hearing a strange signal with a steady tone and a
very weak "N" in morse code behind it (we had been sending messages
between our bedrooms using wire on the back fence and buzzers, so we had
a rudimentary knowledge of the code).  Several years later, after
becoming KN6DGW and KN6EIU, our Elmer, Art (W6RMK now SK) explained the
LF Radio Range to us.

Given the way the slightest bad connection on one of our barbed wire
fences here in N. California can create gobs of intermod on 160, perhaps
we should have tried rusted steel wire for the detector?

73,

Fred K6DGW
Auburn CA CM98