Should I use my house as an antenna?

[Too Tall]

We might be cut from the same cloth. A while ago I was bored and built a crystal radio (similar to below). It's kinda the perfect thing for bathroom reading.

cr1.jpg

[dgaddis]

Without being a fear-monger, my wife and I feel that wifi is the new secondhand smoke so we limit how much we keep it on.

I also don't see how you can avoid it unless you live out in BFE and never go to town. Cell signal, TV, radio, wifi, bluetooth, etc. There's a lot of 'stuff' in the air anywhere you go.

[giordana93]

I bet you have some really old wiring like our house had when I was growing up. It was just bare copper wire run from insulator to insulator. No wonder houses burned down back then. Just takes one well placed mouse. When we first moved in I remember my dad standing in the basement looking up and saying those can't possibly be live. Bzzap!

I had knob and tube in parts of my Cleveland house. fwiw, in spite of looks it is not as dangerous as one thinks, as the wires that could cause a short are not close to each other (as they are in a modern 2-3 conductor wire). Fires weren't caused by mice chewing through a single wire, more likely from bad circuit breakers and boxes (well-documented) or overloaded circuits that someone "upgraded" to a higher amperage without recalling that lower amp circuits are set thus to protect the wires, not to see how much juice can be ran through them

[lumpy]

We might be cut from the same cloth. A while ago I was bored and built a crystal radio (similar to below). It's kinda the perfect thing for bathroom reading.

cr1.jpg

So where does the sound come out?

ETA: So you plug a headphone in at one end and an antenna at the other? What and where is the "crystal"?

[j44ke]

So where does the sound come out?

ETA: So you plug a headphone in at one end and an antenna at the other? What and where is the "crystal"?

The crystal (also called a diode) is between the headphone clip and the tuning wire screw I think.

[thollandpe]

We run the Internet through the electrical wiring in our apartment. An ethernet cable runs from the router into a "Home Plug" unit plugged into an outlet, then I have another Home Plug in a signaless area of the apartment that is connected to my wife's computer by another ethernet cable. Works very well, plenty speedy enough to stream HD movies and bicycle races. Makes me wonder a bit more why knob and tube wiring couldn't be used for some sort of an antenna. Just might not be very powerful.

Jorn, that's a power line carrier signal. You broadcast a signal over the power wires, superimposed on the 60 Hz alternating current. Much different than using a network of random wire lengths and directions to intercept a wave in the air that's of a known amplitude.

[j44ke]

Jorn, that's a power line carrier signal. You broadcast a signal over the power wires, superimposed on the 60 Hz alternating current. Much different than using a network of random wire lengths and directions to intercept a wave in the air that's of a known amplitude.

Aha, I see. Makes sense.

[WayneJ]

Getting radio stations through the internet is easy, but some of us (okay, maybe just me) get great pleasure out of pulling in stations by moving a dial. I'm one of them and it's why I still have my MR-78 tuner. Crazy as it sounds, I even enjoy a little static at times. It reminds me of the days when my dad and I listened to the Red Sox games together.

My antenna choice is a simple di-pole type (t-shaped as tee-aitch-pee-eee mentioned). I have experimented with di-pole antennas of my own and my best success was re purposing a hula-hoop and some wire to tune in very specific FM frequencies on the low end of the dial.

Don't worry, I have a back up hula hoop for using it the proper way.

[j44ke]

My dad listened to the St. Louis Cardinals on the radio while sitting in the car out in the driveway because the car radio had better reception than the radios in the house. Our neighbors told me years later they thought my parents were having marital issues.

[Too Tall]

Actually what Todd said...you can Broadcast via the grid. Ask me how I know. For one glorious year I was the afternoon DJ for KMAC, a carrier current station broadcasting via the campus electrical grid. This is where I learned the true value of Whipping Post.

[Mabouya]

I also don't see how you can avoid it unless you live out in BFE and never go to town. Cell signal, TV, radio, wifi, bluetooth, etc. There's a lot of 'stuff' in the air anywhere you go.

A very cool story about an important astronomical discovery made out in the middle of nowhere, because they wanted to be as far away from radio signals as possible:

Astronomers Glimpse Signposts of Universe's First Stars - Scientific American

[Too Tall]

Here you go >>> United States National Radio Quiet Zone - Wikipedia

First time I was there and sitting in a cafe sipping coffee. Had to read a newspaper instead of googling "manipedi near me". #brutal

[Mabouya]

First time I was there and sitting in a cafe sipping coffee. Had to read a newspaper instead of googling "manipedi near me". #brutal

Yeah, sometimes life can really be rough. Like this: