Simple Crystal Radio

So I will give you alittle bit of a back story behind this project. I literally never had much interest in electronics at all intil one day while I was at work and extremely bored and feeling anti social. I decided to download a book on mtly phone. Long story short I download a book about Nicola Telsa (I will dedicate a blog towards him later as he was an incredible man who has been lost in history) I almost want to stop writing this and do a full disclosure on him.

The one thing that first struck me was his experiments with wireless power transmissions and his projects with radio.
*Telsa fun fact*
He claimed he was able to hear spirits thru his first radios. In fact there are instructions on how to build one. Which I am not allowed to build.. according to my gf.

Ok so to build this crystal radio it is quite simple. Many items can be found around the home. I used 22guage magnetic wire which I found at radio shack. I also had to buy a diode, other then that the rest was stuff I had laying around.

This magnetic wire has many uses. I have used it for many projects.

Any bottle roughly this size will work for this project.

 

These are called aligator clips. These can be purchased online or if your lucky like I was try radio shack.

Funny story about this... I walked into a goodwill and found a phone. At check out I disconnected the headset and left the base... cashier gave me that look.

This is the most important part. This diode can be found at your local electronic store or online. "The 1N34A germanium diode is the modern substitute for galena and most other germanium small-signal diodes will also work well." 

The diode allows the flow or energy in only one direction.

Ok so let's get it started.

Begin by placing two holes side by side at the top as well as the bottom. This will be used to thread the wire through.

Like so.

Take yer wire

Pass one end through and leave enough excess just in case... Always better to have more then not enough... true story.

Send the wire through and then back kinda like a knot. That way it wont come loose during the fun coiling part.

Ok so this is tricky to coil so if possible have a helper. I used a pencil to do my loops. The loops you make are called taps. These taps to keep it simple will be the radio stations each tap hopefully will be different stations.Now take the long end of the wire and start winding it neatly around the bottle. When you have wound five windings on the bottle, stop and make a little loop of wire that stands out from the bottle. Wrapping the wire around a nail or a pencil makes this easy

 Continue winding another five turns, and another little loop. Keep doing this until the bottle is completely wrapped in wire, and you have reached the second set of holes at the bottom of the bottle.

Cut the wire so that at least 8 inches remains, and thread this remaining wire through the two holes like we did at the top of the bottle. The bottle should now look like this:

One important step is to take sand paper and sand the emanel off of the taps being careful of course. The copper needs to be exposed. As well with all the connections make sure there is contact.

So now take your phone reciever and strip the end wires. Should be two pairs. To find which two wires you need take a 9v battery and connect the wires intil when u listen you hear a click. 

As you see mine was black yellow. So isolate the unused pair.

Ok so for me it was easier to use a mini breadboard in order to save time and make sure its connected proper.

Take two jumper cables and your diode and place them like in the pic.

Attach one wire from the headset to the one end of the diode. Where the jumper is on the bread board.

Attach the other wire from the headset to the top wire from the bottle. If you want you may soilder it.

For your antenna I recommend using 50ft of wire. Attach an aligator clip on the other end and this is what connects to the taps. Remember the taps are the different stations. So with the aligator clip u can change stations by selecting different taps. 

Attach another alligator lead to the wire coming from the top of the bottle. This is the ground wire. What I did was run it to my cold water pipe in my kitchen.

This is my beautiful anteena outdoors lol. Hey what ever works right.

Ok sound now that you have followed the steps you should be able to pick up sounds and stations. This does depend on having a proper ground as well as a long antenna. 

Goodluck