When I was a boy in the 40s there were crystal set kits where the rectifier was the contact between a blued steel razor blade and the point of a safety pin. It helped to move the point of the pin over the razor blade to search for the best spot.
Rectifiers don't have to be perfect to give you some demodulation. Any junction with a kink in its transfer function is probably a candidate.
Reg
Heid the baw - goal!! wrote:
Correction: The tunnel junction itself is not nonlinear. In fact a vacuum tunneling junction between two conductors with uniform density of states (DOS) is perfectly ohmic. It's the non-uniform electrode DOS and/or stuff that's going on in the barrier material that make a tunnel junction nonlinear.
--Daniel
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.