A very simple experimental short wave radio receiver. This is basically just a crystal radio with two stages of transistor amplification afterwards. If I remember I used a pair of low impedance headphones with this radio. They were the large types and had excellent sound insulation: when you wore them you wouldn't hear much of what was going on in the room. This probably helped to hear what must have been some very quiet signals from this radio.

The diagram below shows an APPROXIMATE circuit diagram of this radio, drawn by reference to the circuit board itself.

All the components are from scrap. Starting at the left of the photograph, you can see two small coils on formers. One has 9 turns, the other 6. They both have a ferrite slug which I adjusted to get different frequency ranges. I could switch between the two coils, giving two ranges. The radio was built on perforated matrix board: but not the usual "modern" stuff with a 0.1-inch matrix. This old board had 0.15-inch hole spacing. The variable capacitor has a screw for attachment of a tuning knob, but I had none so would vary it by turning the vanes of the by hand. The two transistors are also scrap. They are the circular black (BC153) and metallic (BF185) components in the photograph. All the resistors and capacitors were junk too, the values were chosen according to what came to hand rather than any calculation. The components ahead of the first transistor are unmarked; the fixed capacitor would have been of the order of a few picofarads. The diode is a germanium type.

For an aerial, I strung a piece of wire from my bedroom window at the top of the house to a clothes line pole at the end of the garden, which was narrow and thin. It must have been around 120-150 feet of wire.

This very simple radio actually operated surprisingly well. I spent many hours listening to the BBC World Service and the Radio Moscow World Service (at that time, the English-speaking world radio service of the former USSR). It was of great interest to hear often differing views of the same world events.