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On Thu, 18 Feb 2016 09:51:14 -0500,
wrote:

Where does the cats whisker fit in there? ;-)

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That's easy, the cats whisker is basically a semiconductor diode that
demodulates the AM signal. Of course the availability of vacuum tube
diodes and packaged semiconductors made the "whisker" obsolete. :-)

I was just screwing with you guys. I did make a very simple radio when
I was a kid using the brand new germanium diode for the detector.
There really wasn't much to it since it was basically the old crystal
set design.
The next radio I made was a 3 tube deal that was one of the projects
in a 12 week (by mail) electronics course I took. You got a box of
parts every week and a new project building on what you did the week
before along with a bunch of training material and a self checked
quiz.
It was pretty good training for a kid and the radio worked pretty well
for what it was. It got me interested in DXing