7 ms·

If you time-warped back to sometime around the 1970-80s and showed this article to a bunch of electronically-minded people, ignoring the SDR stuff, they'd take

If you time-warped back to sometime around the 1970-80s and showed this article to a bunch of electronically-minded people, ignoring the SDR stuff, they'd take a quick look and say something like 'um - yeah' and move on. This type of one transistor radio is/was a really common circuit and probably the vast majority of hobbyists built something similar - all without having to run a simulation first. I can recall spending a happy afternoon as a boy in that time period sorting through my box of stuff, pulling out a DL96 vacuum tube and knocking up a MW/SW receiver. I also left countless 'cats whisker'/crystal set (germanium diode) receivers and ZN414-based creations in my wake. The one thing I get out of that article is that technology has moved so far that we now get impressed by the simple stuff - the fundamentals - it's becoming a lost art. I'm not sure I've picked the best modern analogy - but perhaps think of showing someone a USB flash stick and saying "...and when you plug it in to your PC YOU CAN SAVE FILES ON IT". I think this is where I put "Plus ça change..."

jpmattia 12y ago
It goes back farther than that: For ham operators, there was a single-tube radio published in 1932 that pretty well laid out the principles. http://www.w7ekb.com/glowbugs/tx/hartleyonetube.htm http://www.w7ekb.com/glowbugs/tx/hartleyonetube.htm has a nice summary.
- linker3000 12y ago
  Agreed. I restricted my time warp to a period where transistors/FETs were ubiquitous and finally cheap for the hobbyist, but as you say the principles go way back.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  Ah yeah, it's the same principle Also, the receiver and transmitter are awfully similar (in practice, if you build a receiver it will interfere with "everything" around it)
sliverstorm 12y ago
It isn't that the fundamentals themselves become impressive. Rather, we have so much complexity these days, we forget what can be achieved with only a little. I listen to music & radio on my laptop & cell phone, both of which have billions of transistors and thousands of discrete components, compared to the 9? 10? in this circuit. In a sense you could look at this sort of thing as an implied question along the lines of, for all the orders and orders of magnitude of complexity we have now, what has it bought us?
- kordless 12y ago
  Reminds me of learning to code on an early IBM-PC. I coded because I wanted it to do something different. Now 'different' is learning how to install a bazillion libraries and dependencies and hoping I can change that one config file just right to get it to do what I want.
rdtsc 12y ago
The key is "electronically-minded people" phrase I think. Back in the 70s-80s it meant "analog electronic minded people" so these things didn't impress them because there weren't many ways to become electronically minded back then without playing with analog electronics at some point. Today, well... electronically minding could be programming, hardware, that could be digital of course not just analog. These seemingly basic things are just pushed behind a lot of layers of abstractions. It could be building drones, remote control sensors, machine learning, writing games, building distributed systems. Another way to think about is when you have 1Gbps link to your house and 4GHz consumer CPUs not many people will think about analog circuits. They are just too far down in the stack. So when someone mentions those things they seem rather fascinating. I say these things because they kind of mirror my experience. I used to take apart electronics, build radios, remote controlled toys. But, then I got computer. Started to get interested in programming. My box of analog components is still at my parents' house. I have a soldering iron but haven't touched it in 10 years now.
- pling 12y ago
  I was the same until I got into embedded stuff. Started up writing a LP filter in software for something that was buggy as hell and slow and the tooling kept falling over. Changed the design for a simple RC+op amp LP and fell in love with analogue again.
  - crististm 12y ago
    I just love it when my car radio takes two seconds to boot... As in - two seconds is three orders of magnitude larger than it should be.
    - pling 12y ago
      Yes mine does this as well. Totally agree. They went to some insane design effort however for it to remember where it was in the mp3 stream though when you disconnect it for a few seconds to turn the ignition.
- crististm 12y ago
cooperadymas 12y ago
True story: at the coffee shop just this week, I overheard a conversation of someone explaining exactly that. The person they were talking with didn't know how to transfer files between two computers, and was absolutely amazed at the idea of a flash drive.

jpmattia 12y ago

It goes back farther than that: For ham operators, there was a single-tube radio published in 1932 that pretty well laid out the principles. http://www.w7ekb.com/glowbugs/tx/hartleyonetube.htm http://www.w7ekb.com/glowbugs/tx/hartleyonetube.htm has a nice summary.

linker3000 12y ago
Agreed. I restricted my time warp to a period where transistors/FETs were ubiquitous and finally cheap for the hobbyist, but as you say the principles go way back.
raverbashing 12y ago
Ah yeah, it's the same principle Also, the receiver and transmitter are awfully similar (in practice, if you build a receiver it will interfere with "everything" around it)

sliverstorm 12y ago

It isn't that the fundamentals themselves become impressive. Rather, we have so much complexity these days, we forget what can be achieved with only a little. I listen to music & radio on my laptop & cell phone, both of which have billions of transistors and thousands of discrete components, compared to the 9? 10? in this circuit. In a sense you could look at this sort of thing as an implied question along the lines of, for all the orders and orders of magnitude of complexity we have now, what has it bought us?

kordless 12y ago
Reminds me of learning to code on an early IBM-PC. I coded because I wanted it to do something different. Now 'different' is learning how to install a bazillion libraries and dependencies and hoping I can change that one config file just right to get it to do what I want.

rdtsc 12y ago

The key is "electronically-minded people" phrase I think. Back in the 70s-80s it meant "analog electronic minded people" so these things didn't impress them because there weren't many ways to become electronically minded back then without playing with analog electronics at some point. Today, well... electronically minding could be programming, hardware, that could be digital of course not just analog. These seemingly basic things are just pushed behind a lot of layers of abstractions. It could be building drones, remote control sensors, machine learning, writing games, building distributed systems. Another way to think about is when you have 1Gbps link to your house and 4GHz consumer CPUs not many people will think about analog circuits. They are just too far down in the stack. So when someone mentions those things they seem rather fascinating. I say these things because they kind of mirror my experience. I used to take apart electronics, build radios, remote controlled toys. But, then I got computer. Started to get interested in programming. My box of analog components is still at my parents' house. I have a soldering iron but haven't touched it in 10 years now.

pling 12y ago
I was the same until I got into embedded stuff. Started up writing a LP filter in software for something that was buggy as hell and slow and the tooling kept falling over. Changed the design for a simple RC+op amp LP and fell in love with analogue again.
- crististm 12y ago
  I just love it when my car radio takes two seconds to boot... As in - two seconds is three orders of magnitude larger than it should be.
  - pling 12y ago
    Yes mine does this as well. Totally agree. They went to some insane design effort however for it to remember where it was in the mp3 stream though when you disconnect it for a few seconds to turn the ignition.
crististm 12y ago

cooperadymas 12y ago

True story: at the coffee shop just this week, I overheard a conversation of someone explaining exactly that. The person they were talking with didn't know how to transfer files between two computers, and was absolutely amazed at the idea of a flash drive.