The perfect way to listen to a ballgame. The radio on the left, a Westinghouse Aeriola Jr. crystal set which I am listening to the Phillies/Nationals game on now, was made in August of 1921 in the midst of Babe Ruth's second season with the Yankees and less than six months into Warren G. Harding's presidency.
In order to pull in stations (I live some six miles from the nearest AM transmitter in a hilly area), I am using an AM amplifier powered (not shown) by a nine volt battery which I have attached to the radio, a ground wire, and a 200 foot indoor antenna. This amplifier is a homemade device made by some radio enthusiast in Turkey and which I purchased off Ebay for $20.00 plus s/h.
It is very effective in that it increases signal strength between 200% and 300% and can be used for both crystal sets and tube radios from the 1920s & 1930s to improve reception.
That's very cool. Every time I turn on one of my old radios, I think of people back when the radio was new, doing exactly what you're doing, listening to the ball game or some other show. ED
I became addicted to listening to ballgames on the radio during summer breaks from college in the mid 1980s. I'd go back to New York where I grew up & still lived at the time from Atlanta where I went to school and found myself having to listen to Yankee games on the radio in order to keep up with them like I'd always had. You see that is when more and more of their games were moved from free TV (WPIX-11) to cable which we didn't have and which my Dad vowed we would never get because he regarded the idea of having to pay for TV as a form of highway robbery.
Well in some ways I got more out of the games by listening to them on the radio than watching them on TV. I still do and the same is true of football, basketball, and other sporting events. The Orioles and Nationals are part of my current DISH satellite TV package but I only watch them on the TV set if they're playing the Yankees or the Cubs; my two favorite teams. Otherwise, I listen to them on one of my antique radios.
Part or all of the Orioles/Red Sox game tonight will be listened to on my Philco 20 Deluxe in fact. Not an unpleasant way to spend an evening or afternoon to say the least.
I do the same thing Eric. I sometimes pick one of my radios that I have not played in awhile and bring it into the shop and listen to the KC. Royals on it. Nice radios you have there.
I'm not much of a sports guy, but my stepson always liked football, and had a couple franchises he always tried to catch.
A couple years passed, he was getting older and much more interested in video games, as I was getting interested in radio. I remember a few times, I'd be in the kitchen cooking up some amazing dinner with the radio tuned to the game, he'd have the tv on in the living room tuned to the game, but also have headphones on playing a video game and paying no attention to the game whatsoever.
Interesting thing, there's a lot less delay on the radio than on the tv. So the radio was sometimes a whole play ahead of the tv. Something good would happen that I knew he'd want to see, and I'd step around the corner of the wall and say, "Hey, watch this play..." It took him a while the first time to even figure out how I was doing it. I think it was the first time he understood that what he was seeing on tv was not truly "live."
I've never listened to a game on a crystal radio, though... Now I'm going to have to get one set up and try it!
(This post was last modified: 06-18-2016, 11:53 AM by palegreenthumb.)
