This kind of thing amazes me. Radio is such a simple, yet omnipresent, technology that even something not made to listen to radio can accidentally catch and play the signal like an actual radio player would. I sure hope it's never going away.
When I was growing up, we lived within 6km line of sight from a powerful AM broadcaster on 660KHZ.
By some stroke of fortune, our woodstove smoke pipe and the tinfoil backed insulation of the house,
Along with the grounded base but rusty bolted on top of the woodstove created some kind of resonant receiver at that frequency. It would generate sufficient voltage to deliver the occasional electrical shock, which was very mysterious because we had no idea how this stove could shock you, even when the mains were turned off.
The mystery of the source of the power was shocks when we built a wire drying rack above the stove, which acted as a sound transducer. With the glove rack, we were treated to 24/7 programming, mostly community oriented stuff like “problem corner”(community issue discussion) bush relay messages for remote listeners outside of telephone reach, “tradio” (call in radio Craigslist, basically), news shows, talk shows, and some occasional music.
To me, it was just completely normal, never having known anything else besides electrocution hazard wood stoves and radio show mitten racks lol. It did fuel a fascination for electronics, though, so by the time I was seven I was an avid reader of popular electronics magazine. Forrest Mims. What a treasure of an engineer.
