Someone just asked me what the worst hobby construction projects of all time were. In general, Ziff Davis quality control was ridiculously better than Gernsback, so much of the really bad stuff appeared in Radio-Electronics and its renamed and repositioned offspring.
I'd guess that a RE cable tv descrambler project caused the most grief. Fatal errors in the story were combined with the highly restricted places where it would work, added to the questionable skills of the theft-of-cable epsilon minuses.
But my vote for the most mesmerizingly awful hobby project of all time would have to be the magic lamp in the April 96 RE. This was a "free energy" project that was so "not even wrong" on so many levels it clearly was one of a kind.
The premise was that if you took a half wave dimmer circuit and used a 32 volt incandescent bulb lit to normal brightness, your cheap average responding meter would record only one-third the voltage and one-third the current. For an obvious power savings of 90 percent. In reality, of course, we had standard beginning EE student blunder #0001-A of confusing average and RMS current and voltage readings.
Naturally, the author never bothered to touch the 32 volt bulb to see if it was any cooler. Compounding ludicrosities included a patent being granted on a mainstay circuit found in most any
1938 industrial electronics textbook, the circuit being illegal because of power quality considerations, and extreme stability and bulb lifetime issues over late angle phase. Compounded by the author's belief that a conspiracy was doing him in.Amazingly, at a 126 degree half wave dimmer phase delay angle, the ratio of average to RMS current is in fact a whopping 3:1! I did a detailed analysis of related topics in
More on related topics at