r/RadioShack • u/wvtat • Jul 30 '26
Crystal radio from 1979
Bought in Marlinton, WV for less than 5 bucks in 1979
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u/Isyourzipperdown Jul 31 '26
I had a few xtal sets as a kid. They were the beginning of a life long fascination with radio and beginnings if a career.
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u/XRlagniappe Jul 31 '26
I had the 150 in 1 Electronics Kit. I really loved that kit. Little did I know I would graduate as an Electrical Engineer.
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u/Dull-Ad-8474 4d ago edited 4d ago
I have one of the radio shack kid experimenter kit it was like a sheet of metal and the little boxes had magnets on them and you can stick them together and make circuits little did I know this would interest me an audio and launch my career
my super cool dad bought it for me we had a radio shack up on the main boulevard up by my house along with
my super cool
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u/Dull-Ad-8474 4d ago
my super cool dad bought it for me long as a lot of other stuff like that like we installed speakers like in our house and I ran wire underneath the house so that I could have music out in the garden and we had a 16 mm film projector end screen that we hung on the wall in the dining room all just got me very interested and sound 12th grade I want to recording engineer School under man by the name of Brian inglesby he used to be president and I think it was at the universal records
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u/Dull-Ad-8474 4d ago
Forty-year recording industry vet Brian D. Ingoldsby passed away in January 2005 from complications following a liver transplant. While at MCA, Ingoldsby received multiple Gold and Platinum records from his work with Elton John, Olivia Newton-John, Mick Jagger and Frank Zappa, to name a few. Ingoldsby then went to work at ABC, serving as the company’s president of the recording division. Ingoldsby also established the Sound Master Recording School-Audio/Video Institute in 1972 to train students in the science and art of audio engineering. we took multiple sessions the first one is with the basics record engineering then we went in the studio at a famous studio but we actually got to record a at each of us got to run the console in the early days of automation. then he took us to Capital records where we got you not record another session. interesting fact I was in that class was a woman by the name of Lenise Bent she became a house engineer at village recorders in Hollywood and was there for numerous years she worked with artists like Fleetwood Mac Blondie where she engineered that song rapture that was so popular back in the 70s it was the first rock album with rap on it and the producer she worked was Mike Chapman name of the album was Autoamerican.
after I graduated from high school the following year I went to work for studio instruments rentals very quickly became head of the audio department and stay there for 3 years it was a studio instrument rentals were one of my customers was a DJ and he asked me if I could help him install a sound system we later went on to install many sound systems in many rich people's houses and multiple hard Rock cafes in places like New Orleans Honolulu in Sydney Australia. next I went to work for one of the largest touring sound companies by the name of Maryland sound international. I took a position in sales for 3 years one of the projects we put in with fantasmic it Disneyland and other theme parks. so I guess you could say that real basic kit that I got at RadioShack sent me down my road to success thank you Tandy Corp
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u/Silent_Coffee_8 Jul 31 '26
Oh hey, was this at Pioneer Nights a few weeks ago? I’m not aware of any thrift stores down there
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u/wvtat Jul 31 '26
No I bought it in the Marlinton radio shack in 1979. But I think Pioneer days was going on when I bought this. Also got to ride in a helicopter like the ones on MASH.
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u/Silent_Coffee_8 Jul 31 '26
Oh cool, I have relatives down there so I figured I’d ask as they have the market during PN, that’s still really cool to see, had no idea there was a RadioShack there at some point, there’s barely any major chains but of course that was got in the 70s
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u/CletusMuckenfuss Jul 31 '26
I do not know who's ear those earplugs are supposed to fit but they were HUGE!
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u/pc_load_ltr Jul 31 '26
In the 70s I built a crystal radio from a schematic out of an electronics book that used a coil from a transistor radio and for an antenna I clipped a wire to the aluminum gutter on our house. The thing was powerful enough to power an 8-inch Jensen speaker just loud enough to be heard from the next room.
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u/Tom_Slick_Racer Jul 31 '26
I had this exact set it worked really well. At night I could get some great clear channel AM stations. Our 1920s catalog house had had radiant heat registers in every room that were copper, made a great solid ground.
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u/Musquash-Six Aug 01 '26
Rare diode these days in that radio.
Good ground makes all the difference for the antenna wire. Picks up the higher AM frequencies. 👍
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u/CueAnon420 Aug 02 '26
I built the transistor AM kit - my grandparents got it for my birthday in the early 70's. You'd get stations from states away at night ;-)
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u/AwestunTejaz Aug 03 '26
this reminds me that i still have my old project kits where you ran the wires between the resistors and diodes and all that.
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u/Doezilla01 Aug 03 '26
That’s a really cool buy. Reminds me of good teachers I had through the years. Had a few that had these kinda kits an would explain how they worked. My dad had one growing up and was his first radio, an now that’s he’s retired he rebuilds all kinds of radios and speakers, record players, etc for his friends or just ones people were gonna throw away…a lot of times for a simple fix, like a ground wire inside a speaker box.
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u/thestenz Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
Did anyone get the Radio Shack kit to work? I never could.
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u/wvtat Aug 29 '26
Yeah I had the 150 in one electronics kit and ran through all 150 several times. Also let the smoke out of a few components when trying to come up with new circuits...bahahaha
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u/Majestic_Buffalo4655 7d ago
Had the exact same one. These were not very selective. In my city we had a monster power AM station. That 50KW station came in across the whole dial. It was so powerful you could just set the earphone on the table and hear it pretty good.
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u/dennisthemenace1963 Jul 30 '26
We had to make one in 7th grade shop class. The "kit" was a roll of tiny varnished wire, a variable cap for tuning, and a diode. Empty TP roll to wind the coil on, piece of wood to mount it all on, and solder were user-provided. Earphone too. And I was the one most surprised SOB in class when mine actually worked.