One Radio, No Solder, No Power

Getting back to the principle of inductance, I want to show you how it can
enable a simple circuit that receives AM radio signals without a power supply.
This is often known as a crystal radio, because the earliest examples used a
natural mineral crystal that functioned as a semiconductor. The idea originated at
the dawn of telecommunications, but if you’ve never tried it, you’ve missed an
experience that is truly magical.

What You Will Need

Rigid cylindrical object, about three inches in diameter, such as a vitamin
bottle or water bottle (1)
Hookup wire, 22 gauge, 60 feet minimum
Heavier wire, 16 gauge preferred, 50 to 100 feet (this wire may be stranded,
and you can try a thinner gauge to reduce the cost, although your radio may
not pull in so many stations)
Polypropylene rope (“poly rope”) or nylon rope, 10 feet
Germanium diode (1)
High-impedance earphone (1)
Test lead (1)
Alligator clips (3) or use extra test leads
Optional:
9-volt power supply (battery or AC adapter)
LM386 single-chip amplifier
Small loudspeaker (2” acceptable)
The diode and headphone can be ordered from the Scitoys Catalog. A high-
impedance earphone is also available from amazon.com.

Step 1: The Coil

You need to create a coil that will resonate with radio transmissions in the AM
waveband. The coil will consist of 65 turns of 22-gauge hookup wire, measuring
approximately 60 feet.
You can wind the coil around any empty glass or plastic container, so long as it
has parallel sides providing a constant diameter close to 3”. A water bottle will
do, if it isn’t the type made of extremely thin plastic that will be easily squashed
or deformed under pressure.
I just happened to have a vitamin bottle that was exactly the right size. In the
photographs, you’ll notice that it has no label. I softened its adhesive with a heat
gun (lightly, to avoid melting the bottle) and then peeled it off. Some remaining
adhesive residue was removed with a little xylene.
After you prepare a clean, rigid bottle, use a sharp object such as an awl or a nail
to punch two pairs of holes in it, as shown in Figure 5-64. The holes will be used
to anchor the ends of the coil.
Strip some insulation from the end of your hookup wire, and anchor it in one
pair of holes, as shown in Figure 5-65. Now wrap five turns of wire around the
bottle, and keep it from unwinding itself by applying a small, temporary piece of
tape. Duct tape is ideal, or regular Scotch tape will do. “Magic” tape isn’t strong
enough and will be difficult to remove.
Figure 5-64. The holes will anchor wire wrapped around the bottle.
 Figure 5-65. Anchor one end of your wire in a pair of holes.

Now you need to strip away about half an inch of insulation from the wire. The
idea is that you should be able to tap into the coil at this point. Using your wire
strippers, make an incision in the insulation and then pull the plastic coating
away from your incision. See Figure 5-66.

Figure 5-66. Use your wire strippers and your thumbnails to pull back about half an inch of
insulation.
The next step is to twist the exposed wire into a loop, to make it easily accessible
and prevent the insulation from closing up. See Figure 5-67.

Figure 5-67. Create a loop in the section of wire that you exposed.

You just created a tap on your coil. Remove the piece of tape that you used to
hold your first five turns temporarily, and wind another five turns around the
bottle. Apply the tape again, and create another tap. You’ll need a total of 12 of
them, altogether. It doesn’t matter if they don’t line up with each other precisely.
When you have made the last tap, wind five more turns around the bottle and
then cut the wire. Bend the end into a U shape about a half-inch in diameter, so
that you can hook it through the pair of holes that you drilled at the far end of the
bottle. Pull the wire through, then loop it around again to make a secure anchor
point.
My coil wrapped around a vitamin bottle is shown in Figure 5-68.
 Figure 5-68. The completed coil, wrapped tightly around the bottle.

Your next step is to set up an antenna, which will be a section of wire that is as
thick as possible and as long as possible. If you live in a house with a yard
outside, this is easy: just open a window, toss out a reel of 16-gauge wire while
holding the free end, then go outside and string up your antenna by using
polypropylene rope (“poly rope”) or nylon rope, available from any hardware
store, to hang the wire from any available trees, gutters, or poles. The total
length of the wire should be 50 to 100 feet. Where it comes in through the
window, suspend it on another length of poly rope. The idea is to keep your
antenna wire as far away from the ground or from any grounded objects as
possible.
If you don’t have an accessible yard, you can string up your antenna indoors,
hanging it with poly rope or nylon rope from window treatments, door knobs, or
anything else that will keep it off the floor. The antenna doesn’t have to be in a
straight line; in fact you can run it all around the room.

Caution: High Voltage!

The world around us is full of electricity. Normally we’re unaware of it, but a
thunderstorm is a sudden reminder that there’s a huge electrical potential
between the ground below and the clouds above.
If you put up an outdoor antenna, never use it if there is any chance of a
lightning strike. This can be extremely dangerous. Disconnect the indoor end of
your antenna, drag it outside, and push the end of the wire into the ground to
make it safe.

Antenna and Ground

Use an alligator test lead to connect the end of your antenna wire with the top
end of the coil that you made.
Next you need to establish a ground wire. This literally has to connect with the
ground outside. Ideally, you should bury a couple of feet of bare wire in soft,
moist earth—although this may be problematic if you live in a desert area, as I
do. If you use a grounding stake of the type sold by wholesale electrical supply
houses to ground welding equipment, be careful where you hammer it into the
ground. You don’t want to hit any hidden conduits.
A cold-water pipe is often suggested as a good connection with the ground, but
(duh!) this will work only if the pipe is made of metal. Even if your home is
plumbed with copper pipes, a section may have been repaired and replaced with
plastic at some time in the past.
Probably the most reliable option is to attach the wire to the screw in the cover
plate of an electrical outlet, as the electrical system in your house will be
ultimately grounded. But be sure to anchor the wire securely, so there is
absolutely no risk of it touching the sockets in the outlet. I would prefer not to
insert the ground wire in the ground socket of the outlet, because there is the risk
of poking it into the live socket by mistake.
Now you need a couple of slightly hard-to-find items: a germanium diode, which
functions like a silicon-based diode but is better suited to the tiny voltages and
currents that you’ll be dealing with, and a high-impedance earphone. The kind of
earphones or ear buds that you use with a media player will not work here; this
has to be an old-school item, like the one shown in Figure 5-69. If it has a plug
on the end, you’ll have to snip it off and then carefully strip insulation from the
tip of each wire.
 Figure 5-69. This is the type of earphone you need for your no-power radio.

The parts are assembled with test leads and alligator clips, as shown in Figure 5-
70. The real-world version that I built isn’t as neat as the diagram, but the
connections are still the same, as shown in Figure 5-71. Notice that the test lead
at the bottom can latch on to any of the taps on your coil. This is how you will be
tuning your radio.
Figure 5-70. The assembled components.
 Figure 5-71. The real-world version.

If you followed the instructions, and you live within 20 or 30 miles of an AM

radio station, and your hearing is reasonably good, you will be able to listen to
the faint sounds of radio on your earphone—even though you are not applying
any power to the circuit that you built. This project is many decades old, but can
still be a source of surprise and wonder. (See Figure 5-72.)
If you live too far from a radio station, or you can’t put up a very long antenna,
or your ground connection isn’t very good, you may not hear anything. Don’t
give up; wait till sunset. AM radio reception changes radically when the sun is
no longer exciting the atmosphere with its radiation.
To choose among radio stations, move the alligator clip at the end of your test
lead from one tap to another on your coil. Depending on where you live, you
may pick up just one station, or several, playing individually or simultaneously.

Figure 5-72. The simple pleasure of picking up a radio signal with ultra-simple components
and no additional power.

It may seem that you’re getting something for nothing here, but really you are
taking energy from a source of power—the transmitter located at a radio station.
A transmitter pumps power into a broadcasting tower, modulating a fixed
frequency. When the combination of your coil and antenna resonates with that
frequency, you’re sucking in just enough voltage and current to energize a high-
impedance headphone.
The reason you had to make a good ground connection is that power will only
flow through your coil if it has somewhere to go. You can think of the ground as
being an almost infinite power sink, with a reference voltage of zero. The
transmitter at an AM radio station is also likely to have a potential relative to
ground. See Figure 5-73.

Figure 5-73. Your no-power radio takes just enough energy from a distant transmitter to
create a barely audible sound in your earphone.

Enhancements
If you have difficulty hearing anything through your earphone, try substituting a
piezoelectric transducer, also known as a piezo beeper. You need the type that
does not have an oscillator built in, and functions passively, like a loudspeaker.
Press it tightly against your ear, and you may find that it works as well as an
earphone, or better.
You can also try amplifying the signal. Ideally you should use an op-amp for the
first stage, because it has a very high impedance. However, I decided to put op-
amps in Make: More Electronics, where I had room to explore the topic more
thoroughly. As a substitute, you can feed the signal directly into the same
LM386 single-chip amplifier from Experiment 29.
Figure 5-74 shows how simple the circuit can be. The germanium diode can
connect directly with the LM386 input, as I don’t think you’ll need a volume
control. Be sure to include the 10µF capacitor between pins 1 and 8, to increase
the amplification of the chip to its maximum value. Even where I live, about 120
miles from Phoenix, Arizona, I was able to pick up a station broadcasting from
the Phoenix area.

Figure 5-74. The LM386 single-chip amplifier can make your crystal-set radio audible
through a loudspeaker.

If you want to improve the selectivity of your radio, you can add a variable
capacitor to tune the resonance of your circuit more precisely. Variable
capacitors are uncommon today, but you can find one at the same specialty
source that I recommended for the earphone and the germanium diode: the
Scitoys Catalog.
This source is run by a smart man named Simon Quellan Field, whose site
suggests many fun projects that you can pursue at home. One of his clever ideas
is to remove the germanium diode from your radio circuit and substitute a low-
current LED in series with a 1.5-volt battery. This didn’t work for me, because I
live in a remote location; but if you’re close to a transmitter, you may be able to
see the LED varying in intensity as the broadcast power runs through it.

Theory: How Radio Works

High-frequency electromagnetic radiation can travel for miles. To make a radio
transmitter, I could use a 555 timer chip running at, say, 850 kHz (850,000
cycles per second), and would pass this stream of pulses through an extremely
powerful amplifier to a transmission tower—or maybe just a long piece of wire.
If you had some way to block out all the other electromagnetic activity in the air,
you could detect my signal and amplify it.
This was more or less what Guglielmo Marconi did when he performed a
groundbreaking experiment in 1901, except that he had to use a primitive spark
gap, rather than a 555 timer, to create the oscillations. His transmissions were of
limited use, because they had only two states: on or off. You could send Morse
code messages, and that was all.
Marconi is pictured in Figure 5-75.
 Figure 5-75. Guglielmo Marconi, the great pioneer of radio (photograph from Wikimedia
Commons).

Five years later, the first true audio signal was transmitted by imposing lower
audio frequencies on the high-frequency carrier wave. In other words, the audio
signal was “added” to the carrier frequency, so that the power of the carrier
varied with the peaks and valleys of the audio. This is shown in Figure 5-76.
 Figure 5-76. Using a carrier wave of fixed frequency to transmit an audio signal.

At the receiving end, a very simple combination of a capacitor and a coil

detected the carrier frequency out of all the other noise in the electromagnetic
spectrum. The values of the capacitor and the coil were chosen so that their
circuit would resonate at the same frequency as the carrier wave. The basic
circuit is shown in Figure 5-77, where the variable capacitor is represented by a
capacitor symbol with an arrow through it.
 Figure 5-77. When a variable capacitor is added to the previous circuit, it enables better
discrimination among different signals sharing the spectrum.

The carrier wave fluctuates up and down so rapidly, an earphone cannot possibly
keep up with the positive-negative variations. It will remain hesitating at the
midpoint between the highs and lows, producing no sound at all. A diode solves
this problem by blocking the lower half of the signal, leaving just the positive
voltage spikes. Although these are still very small and rapid, they are now all
pushing the diaphragm of the earphone in the same direction, so that it averages
them out, approximately reconstructing the original sound wave. This is shown
in Figure 5-78.
 Figure 5-78. How a simple AM radio receiver decodes the signal and reproduces it on an
earphone.

When a capacitor is added to a receiving circuit, an incoming pulse from the

transmitter is initially blocked by the self-inductance of the coil, while it charges
the capacitor. If an equally negative pulse is received after an interval that is
properly synchronized with the values of the coil and the capacitor, it coincides
with the capacitor discharging and the coil conducting. In this way, the right
frequency of carrier wave makes the circuit resonate in sympathy. At the same
time, audio-frequency fluctuations in the strength of the signal are translated into
fluctuations in voltage in the circuit.
If you are wondering what happens to other frequencies pulled in by the antenna,
the lower ones pass through the coil to ground, while the higher ones pass
through the capacitor to ground. They are just “thrown away.”
The waveband allocated to AM radio ranges from 300kHz to 3MHz in carrier
frequencies. Many other frequencies are allocated for special purposes, such as
ham radio. It’s not so difficult to pass the ham radio exam, and with appropriate
equipment and a well-situated antenna, you can talk directly with people in
widely scattered locations—without relying on any communications network to
connect you.