Crystal radio in 2018

Since I enjoy shortwave DXing and enjoy tinkering with electronics,

it's perfectly reasonable to expect that I'd enjoy homebrew radio

projects. And I'm definitely interested in it in principle, and

every few years the interest gets strong enough that I start searching

for schematics and thinking about things to do. But I'm inevitably

put off pretty quickly by how much trickier sourcing parts is compared

to other projects I could undertake, and how much extra mechanical

faffing is involved. If you want to play with microcontrollers, it's

ludicrously easy. You go to some nice big serious supplier's website,

Mouser or Digikey or RS or whoever, and you use whopping big powerful

parametric search systems to find parts from established brand names,

you buy them for cents per part because ICs are dirt cheap, and

everything turns up in the same box. But if you go to any of these

places and try to find a ferrite rod, or a variable inductor, or a

variable capacitor that varies over hundreds of picofarads, and you'll

either find nothing, or you'll find something obscenely expensive,

because these things are now totally obsolete and super niche. You're

more or less forced into buying random surplus parts from people on

eBay, probably buying from multiple buyers to get the best price and

everything. There's a healthy chance you're going to end up having to

wind some precise number of coil turns yourself on some kind of

former. You won't have much luck prototyping stuff on a breadboard,

because radio is literally voodoo and all sorts of irritating

physical world stuff like parasitic capacitance which you can often

totally ignore for low speed digitial projects will just totally ruin

your day in the RF world. It's just in general more expensive,

involved, and fiddly, and I usually end up abandoning the idea after a

few days.

Recently, though, for whatever reason it has taken a stronger hold

than previously and I have actually bought a crystal radio kit. Yeah,

this is kind of super-basic and boring, but I figured it's a very low

effort way to scratch this recurring itch and see if it takes hold.

Because it's a kit I'm getting all of the parts in one box without

spending days sourcing stuff. If I decide I want to get more serious

I can cannibalise most of the parts for a transistor TRF design. If

nothing else, I tought it would be a little nostalgic. I had a

crystal radio as a kid, one of several of those projects where you

used tight springs sticking vertically up out of a plastic board to

join parts together. I very clearly remember listening to it in bed

one night and hearing a broadcast of mission control radio trafic

associated with a shuttle landing - no idea which one. Obviously this

was being rebroadcast from an Australian AM sation, probably the ABC,

but I'm pretty sure that in my young mind I imagined that I was

hearing this live and direct from the shuttle itself, as ridiculous as

this obviously is.

While I was initially pretty excited to receive the kit, I've been

doing some reading and thinking since then and yesterday it occurred

to me to check something and I made a horrific discovery which has

dented my enthusiasm. The broadcast AM band has more or less been

totally abandoned in Finland. There's a single 100 Watt station in

Tampere and that's it. I can't receive that station in my home with

my Tecsun PL-310ET which is, you know, an actual radio with

batteries and transistors (I might try for it in a forest at night

sometime, but it still seems unlikely). This crystal set is going to

be totally useless, as designed. Apparently in 2018 in this part of

the world, there is just nothing to listen to on AM radio.

The kit is probably not a total write-off (and even if it is, it was

cheap enough that I won't lose any sleep), because there is nothing

specific to the AM broadcast band in a crystal radio, and by removing

some windings from the coil of the tuned circuit I can maybe rejig it

for shortwave or something, or maybe even some amateur bands, although

I think most hams are using SSB these days, which is no good for a

crystal set. But regardless of all this, I am really strangely shaken

by this discovery. It didn't even occur to me to question before I

ordered this whether or not there'd be anything to listen to on it.

I mean, of course there's shit on AM radio. I still can't quite

accept that there's not. I'm not sure why, I have no trouble coming

to grips with the fact that casette tapes and landline phones and

countless other mainstream technologies I grew up with are dead. For

some reason I can't put my finger on, the death of an entire broadcast

band feels massive.

Maybe my perception is warped because I listen to shortwave, which I

think of as roughly 10,000 times more niche and less commercially

viable than any other kind of radio, yet I still have no trouble

finding stuff to listen to on it, so the fact that something

• everybody* has heard of, and that many people with no special

interest in radio probably still own the equipment to receive, is in

so much worse a state just feels really weird. I dunno. Perhaps it's

because, since I never actually regularly listen to any kind of

radio station for it's own sake, I haven't been paying any attention

to what has surely been a long, slow, graudal decline of the medium.

I've just waltzed in at the end and been surprised that it's all over.

Maybe my surprise seems shockingly naive to some people. I dunno.