"Every little picoFarad has a nanoHenry all its own." -- Don Vonada

...do you remember when we
Stayed up all night to get
Pittsburgh on a crystal set? -- Dearie

I received a "Rocket Radio" crystal set as a gift some time ago and didn't do anything with it until recently. I'm not sure why I delayed so long. Anyway, I strung up the antenna wire and connected it, and was a bit surprised at the set not having a place for a proper ground connection. Curiously, the instructions suggested using a metal cold water pipe as an antenna. What? That's a ground connection, if you can find such plumbing nowadays.

At first I heard nothing, no matter how much I tuned around. I tried again in the evening as the AM band picks up after nightfall. Sure enough, I heard something faint. But something wasn't quite right. I couldn't place it until I heard the station ID. It was KFMC, the local FM station. It didn't matter where I tuned. I seemed to have an antenna and no tuning to speak of (well, evidently just enough somewhere for slope detection to work) and got only the strongest signal around - even if it was about 100 MHz too high.

That makes me wonder what I heard on crystal sets in the 1970s. Then I also would only get one local station. But which band? Back then stations still could simulcast on AM and FM, and WJMT did.

In the 1980s I had an interesting experience with a "radio" that really lacked any tuner as such. It was length of antenna wire, a ground connection, a detector (roughly, the bit that converts from radio to audio -- in a crystal set, that's what the crystal does), and an audio amplifier. With no selectivity, it picked up pretty much everything at once. Mostly it picked up stronger shortwave broadcasts.

Only getting the local FM station on a crystal set tuned for the AM band is disappointing. I suppose at least it picked up something besides the local RF hash of the computer(s). Still, it'd be nice to pick up a station in the right band. And I don't expect to get Pittsburgh.

Late dresser

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. -- Winston Churchill

A few weeks ago there was a flap about the National Park Service being pressured by the Bush administration to give a creationist view - or at the very least not give the geological facts as we understand them - about the age of the Grand Canyon. This story was, for some, "too good to check" and so it wasn't checked. It lives or lived on, such as in this erroneous Doonesbury comic. One place that really should have been more skeptical was eSkeptic that rather curiously also didn't check it out until called on it. When they did (follow that last link) they found it was a load of dingos kidneys. In fact, when they called PEER (the originators of the story) on it, they backpedaled and retracted the claim. Somehow I rather doubt that will get nearly as much publicity.

More Linux adventures

The laptop I use currently has Ultima Linux on it. I am not providing a link to the Ultima site because it's not there anymore. I have been told by the maintainer that it will be back, eventually. I am at least one version behind, and now have no means of getting the more recent version. It's also been my experience with this sort of thing that 'eventually' tends to become 'never' and so now I again look for a distribution to run on the laptop.

( Zen? Not now. And Wolvix at the door. )