Category Archives: Funny

How to turn your AM radio into a metal detector

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Really? This radio could find a missing toy?

While watching Curious George on PBS Kids with my four year old, I learned something. In the episode we viewed–“Curious George, Metal Detective”–George needs a metal detector to find a toy robot he’s lost in the sand, but the one he’s borrowed has run out of batteries.  “How about making one?” his scientist friend suggests. Make one? “It’s easy,” she explains: simply by taping an AM radio and calculator together, you can make your own metal detector. George tries it, and–lo and behold–finds his missing toy.

Really? I wondered. Was this PBS show feeding my skeptical children science fiction?

I quickly googled the notion, and apparently, it works!  Watch the video below for a tutorial on building your own deluxe model:

Lessons learned? You’re never too old to learn from Curious George, PBS, or the fellow in this video.  And radios are clearly even more versatile than even I guessed.

Now, back to metal detecting…Is that another soda can?

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Pirate Radio and Hurricane Irene

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Last night, I tuned to the pirate radio watering hole of 6,925 kHz shortwave. I caught a bit of the Southern Relay Network as they played several hurricane and storm themed songs.

I recorded a bit of the end of the show for you. Note that there was a lot of noise on the frequency–many of the static crashes were attributed to Hurricane Irene herself.

Click here to download/play the mp3 file, use the archive.org flash player below (if visible) or simply visit the archive.org audio page. Enjoy!

Radio used, by the way, was the Alinco DX-R8T. We will be posting a review of this receiver, so check back soon!

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Jonathan Marks re-publishes “The Hitch-Hikers Guide to DXing”

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Jonathan Marks has re-released The Hitch-Hikers Guide to DXing. In his own words:

It is thirty years ago since I wrote a rather silly parody on both international radio broadcasting based on my favorite radio series at the time, the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. There seemed to be so much to make fun of at the time…the boring propaganda at the height of the Cold War, jamming, the waste of energy shouting from one country to another, and the variable quality of reaction from listeners. I don’t think it was the listeners’s fault that most of the feedback was very technical, to do with signal strength and QSL cards rather than comments on the programme. May be people were being too polite.

[…]There wasn’t much time to write radio drama on the second floor of the Radio Netherlands building. And there was no budget to hire actors. So I just rattled it off on a typewriter and asked colleagues to come and read their parts in a lunchtime recording session. This was all two track material, sliced together with a chinagraph pencil and a razor blade. In total we made 5 in 1981 to fit the 5th Thursday in the month, and then one more in 1982 as a Christmas special.

To listen to all five episodes, simply cruise to the Media Network Vintage Vault and start with Episode 1. It’s well worth a listen and a nice little piece of 1981 RNW ingenuity.

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