I know nothing about anything. That is the conclusion I came to recently. Because if the world were to end tomorrow and somebody would ask me, okay, how do you reintroduce electricity in this end times world, you know, I would be like, what?
I don't know. How would I know? I'm only using like 100 electric items at the same time right now, because there's a camera, there's two lights. I'm speaking to a microphone and there's like my smartphone behind me.
But what is electricity? How would I know? And of course it's fine and all to not know everything about everything, but at the same time just naturally curious about the inventions that humans have come up with over thousands of years that make our modern day life so comfortable. And if I'm using some of these items and I don't even know the simple basic mechanisms that are behind it, I feel like I'm missing out a little bit on the experience. Which is why to understand, sometimes you just have to experiment.
As Albert Einstein once said, I have no special talents, I'm just passionately curious. Um, and I'm not comparing myself to Albert Einstein at this moment, of course. It's-there's- there's no correlation whatsoever, I just thought it was a cool quote. Because today, dear viewers, we're building a radio.
Well, I'm building a radio, but you can watch me struggle. At this point in time you might be like, but why a radio and what was this intro? I think sometimes you just have to start small.
And a Reddit post told me that apparently it's not that hard to build a radio, because there's such a thing called a crystal radio, which is the most basic form of a radio which you can build with scraps lying around at home. Well, most of the stuff you have lying around at home. I don't know how many of you have germanium diodes lying around, because I didn't and I ordered them from Amazon. But yeah, we're learning about radio, because we all have to start somewhere. And somehow I imprinted on that project, okay?
I could have imprinted on anything, but I imprinted on the radio project. We're gonna go with that. Did you ever think about how radio waves work? Because, well, I mean, they're always everywhere. And how can I build a thing out of scraps and it works without having energy and- How can it make noise and what the hell is a radio wave in the first place?
Like, is it dangerous? I mean, doesn't it seem like magic to you that there's this thing built of metal that can produce sounds that are being spoken a hundred miles or even further away than sent through radio waves through the air? I don't know.
I think it's like magic. And to understand magic, you just have to uncover the trick. So to unlock this big mystery of radio waves, join me today as I'm unlocking a new talent, being a scientist.
I will basically be mainly following a video by Rimstar Orc, who is like the king of all things crystal radio on YouTube. I think there's something to be said about an 11 year old YouTube video that is still relevant and not outdated as well. Now every good structure needs a game plan, which is why I'm gonna explain the game plan to you now, because I'm not just gonna start building and end up with something else.
What if I accidentally build a supercomputer? That shouldn't be happening. So of course we're gonna think about what we actually need to do to build a radio. So first things first, I'm gonna like draw up the structure that we're gonna follow today, and I'm gonna start with this thing, like the capacitor it's called.
So what the capacitor... No, it's inductor. I'm already wrong. Okay. I'm back.
I needed a few minutes to look at everything. Okay, so we're gonna start with where the radio waves are coming from. They're coming from up here, from our antenna. You can think of it like this.
When we're out in the world, there are radio waves all around, and our antenna is basically just there to catch these waves in the form of electrons and bring them into our circuit. Which, what we have here is called the inductor. It's called that because it does one thing called induction. And together with a capacitor, it builds like a small network that is basically there to filter out the radio waves that we want to hear while at the same time kind of like strengthening the radio waves because when they are coming from here they are way too weak but when they come into this tuned coil they kind of build up an electromagnetic field that gets stronger and that gets the whole circuit moving with electrons i'm trying to explain this here i have no fucking idea and then the capacitor sits somewhere here the capacitor in our case with two aluminum rolls you But they don't touch each other. That is very important that here there's some kind of thing where the electrons can just go through like we have a lot of positive charge at this side and a lot of negative charge at this side, but it can't go through here So that's how the whole circuit starts up again in a way You can think of this also as like a small battery because we don't have any power that actually powers our radio So what we need to do is we need to strengthen the energy that is coming from the radio waves And that is what this thing here does and down here.
We have a ground connection From here on out we actually have our diode, or this would be the crystal, I guess, if we were using an actual crystal. I'm gonna draw it in the form of an arrow, because what the diode basically does is it, like, sends the election waves down in only one direction. So here it can't be happening that stuff from here is going over there, and stuff from here is going over there. Up here is one wave flow for the electrons.
And where does this one wave flow lead? Well, that one-way float leads to our earpiece. This also needs to be connected back again to the circuit.
So far for the basic explanation, I'm gonna jump into more detail of what everything does when we're gonna start building it, which we're gonna do now. Here are all the materials I collected for this undertaking. We have a coil of wire, specifically magnet wire.
They said this in the video, so I ordered like this magnet wire. Then we have something which I forgot to lay out. We have this here, which are the germanium diodes that we need. We also have an earpiece.
Usually you would use like an piezoelectric earpiece, but I'm gonna use a magnet wire. I didn't want to order one because they were actually quite expensive to order and so I destroyed a smoke alarm and extracted this thing which I think is also piezoelectric because it has a crystal part down here. This is actually the biggest part of the experiment because I don't know if this will work or not but somehow in my brain it worked.
I soldered it together with this ear jack here. Before you start soldering you need to put some fresh solder on. Then we have some toilet paper rolls, some wires, some things which I just need to connect everything.
And then also additionally to all of this we need some aluminum foil. A brief history of radio. In 1873 James Clerk Markwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves in his theory of electromagnetism, now called Maxwell's equation, proposing that also light consists of such waves.
Fast forward to 1896 when Hertz Hertz confirmed Maxwell's theory by generating and detecting radio waves and demonstrating their properties like reflection and refraction. His and others experiments thus showed that radio waves actually behave like light waves and also travel at the same speed. In 1895, Giuliano Marconi developed the first practical radio communication system, utilizing a spark gap transmitter to send Morse code over long distances.
By 1901, he successfully transmitted a signal across the Atlantic Ocean. Also in recognition of their contributions to the advancement of wireless telegraphy, Marconi and Carl Friedrich Bowne were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909. Commercial broadcasting didn't start until later in 1920 though, making this technology for consumers only a bit over 100 years old at this point. Isn't that crazy?
I mean, it feels like forever, but the radio has only been a around for about 100 years. Okay, but this isn't supposed to be a history lesson and what we're doing today is also not a radio transmitter. We're building a small radio receiver, which means we won't be sending out signal into space or around us, but rather we are trying to build a contraption that receives signal and turns it back into sound.
It's called a crystal radio because the original version used a crystal to rectify the AM radio signal, but today because we're in modern times and it's just easier, we're using a diode. This of course still begs two questions, I think. The first of course being how the hell does it work whether it be a diode or not.
or a crystal and why is it so important? And the second one is what is the difference between AM and FM radio waves and why are we only going to be able to catch AM radio waves with the thing that we're going to be building today? I actually never thought about the difference of AM and FM.
I knew the words of course beforehand and I know like what an FM radio is and that AM radio is a bit different from that but I don't know how it is different and how it makes a difference in our building project today. The shirt is my mother, can't be seen It's my mother, yes we can Many months later Dear ladies and gentlemen, after 10 radios, over 100 euros spent in wire, I finally managed to get signal. Okay, so the thing is, I honestly didn't think it would be that hard in a way. I thought I'm just gonna follow the diagram and then it'll work.
And it didn't work the first 20 tries. But I also was already too deep in and I didn't want to give up because I heard so many other people. being able to do it.
I was like maybe I just don't have radio signal in my area here. I don't know, it's obviously easier if you live closer to a radio station. And here I am in the middle of nowhere.
As you can see there's actually no radio station anywhere near me. And what can I say, never give up in life because you might just succeed. I didn't fully succeed I would say because while I do get signal it's way too weak to even hear the specific songs or words and I'm not quite sure if it's Indian or if it's English. There's this wire that is set up all across the yard.
It's like... Going around, around, around, and if you follow it, then you come to the final successful crystal radio build, which is this one. I went away from using a capacitor, though I may want to try that later again because it should help with the volume, and instead used a resistor to get the signal to also the very correct...
piezoelectric earphone because before that I tried the speaker stuff that didn't work at all but at least I know how to solder now I guess. My ground connection is this water pipe that goes down our house and then the other antenna goes all the way there into the cornfield. In all honesty though I don't even feel like this is about me getting signal. This is about perseverance and science and never giving up and I even got my brother to come down here and confirm that he's also hearing things that I'm not imagining things after doing this for two months straight.
I thought people had an incredibly positive image of us. When we were talking about Madame Gourdu, she was a very elegant woman, with a very attractive appearance, clearly beautiful. Because the political... Thank you very much.
You can hear French quite well. But how can you understand French? And wasn't it English before? I could have heard it.
I also thought it was English. proof that I've been on this grind for so long and like every evening in my PJs I'm sitting here trying to get some signal. Sitting in the middle of my garden with like 30 meters of wires around me with a contraption that has more wire and cardboard and nails.
and I'm listening to French radio. Yes, I did build so many radios. I think I built like in total 10, but these are the four that were in the last rotation where I was always trying things out with them.
But none of them worked. The question, of course, is why? And to you, radio builders of the future, maybe, I would say the main two things that I learned are A, you do have to use the correct piezoelectric speaker, at least at first, if you're trying to get into the project, because this is the easiest way to see if you are getting good signal, because it does pick up on the smallest possible signal. No.
Two, make sure that all of your connections are really really good. That means normal wire or normal wire that all the insulation is off, because sometimes on the magnet wire you don't see if there's still insulation on. So you really have to make sure either with acetone or with sandpaper that you really do get it off and that the connection that you have with both diode and the earphones is quite long and quite tight.
So everything is really wrapped around and together. Make sure that you have sufficient ground connection. That means that you really do have something like water pipe or like for me I use the thing that goes down my house as you And then that you also have at the same time good aerial connection.
That means that your antenna isn't low on the ground. So really hide and have it off the ground. Have it not touch any metal like water pipes that could lead to something else. Because you do want to just separate from everything in the air.
And yeah some of these builds do have the capacitor that I originally wanted to build. I think adding the resistor, which I did in this last build, which was here, made such a difference. And the resistor is the thing that goes between the two earphones to really up the signal again as well. and still then it was so silent.
So yeah, if you don't hear anything for a long time, never give up, because it should be able to work. And if I got it to work in the middle of nowhere, then you should be able to get it to work as well. I never really answered the question that I posed in the history lesson of this video, which was what is the difference between AM and FM radio and how do we actually decode the signal? AM is short for amplitude modulation, while FM is short for frequency modulation.
They are basically two waves to modulate radio waves to carry information that can be picked up by receivers. Think of it like adding something to the sound wave. Like in the beginning we have the voice.
the sound waves. And this is being connected to a sine wave. Okay, so let me quickly explain how amplitude modulation works.
So let's say we want to send a signal and this is the signal. It's maybe like an audio signal or whatever. Think of this like longer, like an audio waveform. But I can't send it like this because like this it's way too slow and really can't send it over long distances.
So what I do is I combine it with a wave of a higher frequency to be able to send it further via radio transmission with like a powerful tower, like a radio tower or something. And what I do in amplitude modulation basically is I combine this and make it like higher amplitude. So it's basically still the same frequency all over and over again. So all of these waves are like the same length apart from each other, even though I can't draw very well. And if you know which frequency I send this carrier wave on, you can decode the signal that is sent.
Up here we have the signal wave that the radio tower wants to send to you and it decodes it or it sends it along with a sine wave, basically. So anyway, I feel like I learned a whole lot while making this video and I hope you had fun. fun and learned a little bit as well maybe and if you want to see whatever weird thing i get up to next because this video totally doesn't have an upload schedule you just see videos whenever i get an urge to make a video about something and that can range from things like building a radio to anime to video film topics or something totally different so whatever comes next comes next i say anyway as always thanks so much for watching this video i hope you have a great day great night great midday wherever you are um and bye be back on my channel There's wire everywhere.
Ha ha! Crazy how this... Video signal was also transmitted via some FM wave that comes to you. Did you ever think about that?
The wonders of communication technology. Okay, bye.