In article ,
William Sommerwerck wrote:
The 1950 ish console my parents had did pick up the local
AM station with the radio off. There was no long antenna.

I'm curious as to what the mechanism was...

The station was located bout 3/4 of a mile away and the
console was all tube with a transformer that fed the speaker.

By "mechanism", I meant what was going on electrically. How was the signal
picked up, demodulated, and fed to the speaker at sufficient level to be
audible?

One example, back about 20 years ago, a friend on the Olympic Peninsula
had an old Knight Kit tube stereo amp. It was able to pick up both
KGEI near San Francisco (a religious shortwave broadcaster, specializing
in Russian Language, who had a really strong signal in the 6 Mhz band)
and the Soviet's "Woodpecker" over the horizon radar that used HF.

His (long) speaker wires were probably a good half wave dipole at that
frequency, and the feedback circuit provided a good path from the speaker
wiring back to the low level input circuitry.

Mark Zenier
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)