Transcript for RocketBoom_September_19_2007

[♪ Rocketboom Music ♪]

Hello, and good Wednesday, September 19, 2007.

I'm Joanne, and this is Rocketboom.

For today, we will be going to Bre Pettis for Try This At Home,

but just beforehand, let me remind you that you can see my two talk shows on paltalk.com

on Mondays and Wednesdays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

Tonight I'll be talking to some of the cast members from HBO's show Entourage. It should be fun.

Now over to Bre.

We are going to be making a foxhole radio. And the cool thing is, you don't need a foxhole.

You do need a paper tube, some wire, a paper clip, a razor blade, a little tiny, teeny pencil, and a few other things.

As well as lots of instructions. So Bre, make it away.

This week we're going to make a foxhole radio.

During World War II, GIs got really clever and made up really cool radios

that were super simple so that they could listen to radio stations.

There were German stations you could listen to

and sometimes you even got lucky and heard an English station.

To make this project, you're going to need a toilet paper tube.

You're going to need a safety pin, a bunch of thumb tacks, and a razor blade.

Oh, and you're going to need some magnet wire and a board to put it all on.

Plus, an antenna, which is just a long wire.

I'm just going to use some wire I scrounged out of a Cat 6 cable,

and for the ground, I am going to use some of that same wire as well.

Alright, let's make it.

For the coil, I'm using magnet wire.

That's because it has a nonconductive coating.

GIs in the field would have found stuff like this in motors,

or they could have just used regular wire and coated it with varnish.

[♪ Music playing in the background ♪] You can attach it with tape before you wind it up

or put a hole in it and tie it on.

That'll keep it from slipping as you wind it up.

Wind it 120 times

[♪ Music continues ♪]

I am trying this again and I have poked a hole in here so I can tie the wire on.

And now I'm just going to slide this over the drill press.

[Clicking noise from drill press] Ummm, it's going the wrong way.

[Clicking noise from drill press continues]

That definitely didn't work.

So I tried it with a hand drill and that definitely didn't work.

You've got to hand-wind this thing.

The next thing I did is I put the whole thing together according to this schematic.

I will include this in the PDF so you can check it out.

Alright, so I've got my coil here and I'm using paper clips and thumb tacks to attach things together.

There is no saudering involved in this project.

You can just wire everything up.

This is the detector and it's got a cat whisker and a razor blade.

What you've got here is, you've got a safety pin and a little pencil lead here.

This hooks up to the antenna. This hooks up to ground. These hook up to the earphone, which I've got right here.

Okay. Now I just tried this out and it didn't work.

And I think the reason why is that this razor blade has been blued.

They use this special type of blued razor blade back in World War II.

And blued razor blades, basically what that means is it's been heated up really hot so that it turns blue,

and I think that makes it stay sharper longer.

So, I am going to have to actually make this blue myself.

I've got this all set up on metal so it won't burn,

and I've got it in vice grips, attached to little clamps, that are attached to the razor blade

so that this can get as hot as possible and not get a lot of heat going this way.

Let's try this out.

[Siren sounds]

[Blow torch sounds]

Alright, now I am by the window and I am doing that because I've got the antenna going out the window

and the ground hooked up to the radiator here as a ground.

And what I've done is I have taken the little cat whisker and I have adjusted that.

And now, through the earphone, I can hear radio.

It's like a talk radio show.

I can just faintly hear it but it's enough to understand it.

Okay, I am going to go ahead and hook this up to the camera.

I've attached a little jack from a headphone and I will plug this right in.

[Static and faint voices]

>>Yeah.

>>And if he did it, I would have set it up where he got caught. But I would at least given him a chance to not...

This is a great project for you to get started in radio.

This is the same radio that GIs used as they were in foxholes in Europe.

It's really simple and really fun. It doesn't use any batteries.

All the power comes straight out of the air, the radio waves.

Okay, go out there, make yourself a radio, and have a great weekend.

cc I Make Things LLC

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