NavList:

Todd,

Thanks! I haven't tuned in CHU in at least a decade. That's a sound of my teenage years. Every tone of the voices and beeps and clicks, every aspect of the timing and cadence. I used to tune in CHU every day when I was first learning celestial navigation. I can still hear that "song" in my head when I count seconds, and that guarantees the pace of my counting.

But that radio?! You can get CHU using that simple receiver? I had no idea. Just to clarify, did you make this recording with that receiver?

This reminds me of one of my favorite bits of conversation about "life after the apocalypse" (not a real conversation but one of those things that comes up with friends after a few beers). If there was a real collapse of civilization, like a "Dark Ages", what technologies would recover most quickly? I like to point out that, first of all, basic DC electric motors and generators will never be forgotten. They're too simple and too miraculous (rare earth super-magnets might be a scarce, expensive "before time" enabling technology however). And second, AM radio for similar reasons. Transistors might be rare items "from the before time" but they would still exist in large enough quantities to supply a market for decades. Even without, it's back to the traditional homemade (or natural) crystal diode. Low-power speakers or earphones, like the ones traditionally sold for crystal sets, might turn out to be a bit of a bottleneck in the technology. Otherwise... radio would come back fast and... "it's a sunny Saturday morning after the apocalypse, and here's the radioactivity report at noon." :)

Frank Reed
PS: You may wonder, where is celestial navigation "after the apocalypse"? It can recover quickly with a couple of conditions. Latitude by Noon Sun could be available early (if someone can publish a basic nautical almanac, which shouldn't be too difficult for the Sun and some stars), but longitude? That could prove to be more difficult than DC electric power!