The whole project took me two days, once I had all the parts gathered. I might add an active electronic VHF amplifier in the future – there’s still lots of room left inside the case. The screw-on wire connections on the terminal block also allow me to make easy modifications later. I also added a grounding post to the back panel. I decided run all the wiring to a terminal block, in order to keep it neat and make the wiring more solid than is possible when soldering everything directly point-to-point. To the outputs I can attach probes, antennas, or feed into an external amplifier for improved broadcasting power. I can also inject audio or RF signals into the device. The witness and stick plates are paralleled to the input and output connections, so I can plug in hand contact grips, conductive wrist bands, or an external witness well. A double-terminated quartz crystal with eight turns of wire is in the circuit between each pot to increase the tuning sensitivity (a total of three). The leads are long enough to open the box and rest the top on the bench, so I wrapped the wires with heat-shrink tubing and put a dab of silicon goop over the holes to reinforce the wires – magnet wire can break easily if it’s flexed too much. The witness plate is a solid brass plate, a layer of bakelite, and another layer of brass, which is connected to the wires, which then pass through small holes in the top. (And I didn’t have to deal with decals for the numbering.) The stick pad is an eight-turn bifilar coil of magnet wire sandwiched between a layer of vinyl (vinyl plastic is a known insulator of eloptic energy) and a touch-pad of bakelite. I found some metal dial plates with 0-100 increments to give the dials a very professional look, which is a much more accurate scale than knobs with numbers on them. Each tuning dial is a precision, sealed 10k ohm potentiometer.

Radionic box