In article loAzl.35968$DP1.24027@attbi_s22,
"William R. Walsh"
m wrote:

Hello all...

I was cleaning up some stuff in the basement when I found a cardboard box
with a Newsweek address on it. Opening it revealed a small white-cased
device with an on-off pushbutton and a speaker. It uses 4 double-A
batteries. There are no other controls or indicators on it anywhere.

I first thought that it had to be some kind of a fixed-frequency radio,
probably something that was tuned to one AM station for promotional purposes
or maybe even a weather radio. But it doesn't seem to receive
anything--assuming it even works. With batteries in place, it would hum
(much like ground loop hum) and the sound would get louder near electrical
wiring. I never heard any sort of station or static.

Taking it apart revealed a very simple circuit board with a coil, power
switch, a few small transistors, some resistors and a few caps. It's really
very simple--too simple to be any kind of radio I'd know about. The one IC
on it is an STMicroelectronics TBA820M audio amplifier, with a date code of
early 1988. Running it while taken apart revealed a few things--let the
circuit board get near the battery compartment or wires, and the speaker
would go into feedback. The coil on the board was sensitive to touch or
metal tools--and produced a "tapping" sound in the speaker when touched. It
was not sensitve to other random objects on my workbench. I also found that
I could feed audio into one of the connections on the coil and hear it
clearly through the speaker.

A picture of the circuit board is he
http://greyghost.mooo.com/newsweek-radio.jpg (541x255, 47KB)

William

A wild guess: an inductively-coupled half speakerphone--set near a
(transformer-based) phone, it would pick up audio from the transformer
in the phone and let everybody else in the room hear--but obviously not
directly participate in--the conversation.

--
Andrew Erickson

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot
lose." -- Jim Elliot