Not everyone lives in America!
In my past of the world (Australia) AM broadcast is still fairly high quality, especially on the government ABC stations.
And AM Broadcast can be almost as good quality as FM. It's just a matter of the manufacturer including a "wide" IF filter. Which of course most don't, so Americans are limited to lousy AM quality. Catch 22.
Sadly the old Flying Doctor network has long since closed down, and the ubiquitous 4WD with HF radio are now relatively rare.
Certainly domestic vehicles with AM Broadcast radios would outnumber them 100 to 1.
And FWIW the ABC stopped transmitting their HF regional services back when Radio Australia shut down it's Shortwave broadcasts in 2017.
Not everyone lives in America!
In much of the World, AM radio is still the only thing that can cover vast distances.
Most modern vehicles use the heater wires embedded in the windscreen as the AM and FM antenna.
Completely wrong:
The AM Broadcast antenna on a modern vehicle is a simple vertical wire.
A ferrite rod type antenna cannot be used because it would be shielded by the metal body (not to mention picking up massive electrical interference).
No, they use a simple "diplexer" so the DC current for the heater is separated from the RF antenna current.
Completely wrong.
Many cars make use of the windscreen heater wires for the radio antenna.
And where a better antenna is required, an active antenna a few inches long can be used. Often this is shared with the mobile phone antenna.
Yes, and if there was radio energy sufficiently powerful to affect humans, any of the crappy domestic equipment in the vicinity would be squawking and resetting due to the poor RF Immunity of most modern appliances.
No, it doesn't:
If you are trying to block microwaves, any earth lead will be multiple wavelengths, so will be ineffective.
Faraday cages are earthed for electrical safely, not for any other reasons.
> but if it's like microwave ovens are, you will know when the beam is hitting you because the foil will heat up.
Actually you have it backwards: The tin foil would reflect the energy away, so it wouldn't get hot.
To get hot it would need to absorb energy, eg it would need to be lossy (eg resistive).
And that of course is what happens when (high power) microwave energy hit human flesh, allowing us to feel the warmth.
> Power companies have sophisticated measuring equipment to detect losses of energy along their power lines
This is nonsense.
If the lost power was measurable, then a simple Transmission Line Analyzer (eg Pulse Echo Tester) could be used to pin-point exactly where the leak was, and how much power was leaking.
In reality power which could be "stolen" would be far too small to measure.
Yes, he may have been required to pay a radio/TV license, but this has nothing to do with stealing power.
The laws of physics tell us that the amount of power he could obstain would be far too small to affect the strength of the broadcast signal. If it was, then all of the wire fences and metal bards in the area would need to be town down.
Broadcast Transmitter sites often have a parasitic tower to place a notch in a certain direction to protect another station on the same frequency.
But to be reasonably efficient, these parasitic towers are huge, at least as large as the main transmitting mast.
A farmer who used relatively short lengths of wire to "harvest power" is going to have a negligible effect on the radiated signal. It it did work, then all of the fences and metal clad barns in the area would need to be torn down.
Whatever, none of this is a mystery. The science of electo-magnetics and antenna design has been understood for almost a hundred years. Any radio hobbyist can fire up a copy of a antenna simulation program and study the effect of various lengths of wire in the vicinity of a transmitter. It's how antenna are designed these days.
> And a very terrible receiver at that.
But good enough to hear stations thousands of miles away, given a suitable antenna.
Just ask the Crystal Set hobbyists.
Germanium diodes are readily available, and there are many alternatives such as Schottky diodes or FET detectors.
To convert a low impedance phone, simply use a high impedance transformer. Or use use a Crystal Earpiece or a piezo buzzer.
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