Builders' Roster & Continental Reception Ledger · Spring 1926
Twenty-two members across four states. Crystal sets only — no tubes, no batteries, no current drawn from any wall. We catch our voices clean from the night sky. Letters welcomed.
Select any member to expand their current build and recent night-catches.
Crystals, coils, whiskers, antennae — what we use and what we trade by post.
Every catch worth keeping. Submit your own — it stays on this set.
Log a Reception
— the air is full of voices —
From the Apparatus Catalogue · Spring 1925
PEMBRIDGE & SON — Millbrook, Indiana
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COMPLETE CRYSTAL RECEIVING APPARATUS
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No. 47 — Junior Builder's Set ......... 89¢
· Galena crystal, lead-cup mounted
· Phosphor-bronze cat's-whisker
· Tapped inductor, 100 turns, #22 DCC
· Pair 2,000-ohm head receivers
· Twenty feet of antenna wire, insulators
No. 88 — Master Builder's Apparatus . $4.75
· Bremer-Tully 23-plate variable capacitor
· Three-tap honeycomb coil assembly
· Pressure-screw detector mount
· Crystal selection: galena · pyrite · silicon
· Walnut cabinet with brass binding posts
· 80 ft #14 copper aerial wire included
No. 112 — Hutchins Pattern Detector .. $1.40
· Variable-pressure cat's-whisker mount
· Phosphor-bronze whisker, 3 spares
· Thumb-screw micro-adjust to 1/64 in.
[Diagram herewith: spiral coil winding,
22-gauge double-cotton-covered wire,
single-layer, 4-inch oatmeal-carton form,
every tenth turn tapped to brass terminal.]
Postage paid east of the Mississippi.
Money refunded if not delighted.
To my fellow builders of the Midwest circuits —
We work without batteries. We work without tubes. We work without the licensure of any corporation. The galena cube on my workbench cost forty-five cents, and tonight it brought me Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and a faint dance band I believe to be from Texas. No company gave me that. No man in a tall building. The ionosphere gave me that, and the patient quarter-turn of a brass screw at three in the morning.
When I was a boy I watched the railroads come and felt the country shrink. Crystal radio shrinks it further, and asks nothing of us but care and an honest antenna. There are nights I have heard a voice from Schenectady and felt the curtain of distance lift clean off the world.
Keep your logbooks faithful. Trade your tunings by post. Wind your coils evenly. The air is full of voices and they belong to all of us.
— Geo. Hutchins, Indianapolis · Spring, 1925