Today's 'what the heck is it?' item...

Probablty a Stud Finder -- locates the nails in the drywall hammered into the stud.

Jonesy

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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

Something that traces phone wires or other electric wiring?

That's about what I would guess.

A friend of mine recently had to trace down a couple of short circuits in some in-wall wiring... a house he partially built a couple of decades ago, which passed electrical inspection and has since been sitting empty and idle. He disconnected the mains, then rigged up an audio oscillator and power amp and a current-limiting resistor, and used the combination to put an audio tone into the wiring at the breaker box between the two wires which were showing a shorted load. He then used a home-made setup similar to what you're showing (a coil, fed to an audio amplifier) to trace along the walls, using the audible tone to figure out where the wires were running inside the drywall.

By noting where the tone suddenly disappeared, he was able to figure out where the wires inside the Romex were shorted. In the first case, it was due to a drywall screw that had bit into the Romex and shorted hot to ground (the screwhead turned out to be within 1/16" of where he marked the "lost the signal here" spot on the painted drywall). In the second case, he lost the tone at an outlet/switch box, and found that an overly-tight cable retaining clamp had caused "cold flow" in the PVC insulation of the Romex and had punched a small pinhole through to the hot wire.

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It could be an induction loop amplifier ! Used by people that are hard of hearing !

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Best Regards:
                     Baron.

And finds where power cables are.

Graham

I have one of these things. The circuit board is identical to the one in the pic.

At first, I did think it was some sort of telephone amplifier.

But now I'm inclined toward the stud or wiring finder type of application.

This is a small embossed arrow next to the on/off switch that lines up with the coil.

Mine buzzes to some extent all the time, but is sensitive to ferrous and/or magnetized objects near the coil. It squeels in various ways depending on size, orientation, magnet strength, etc.

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Kinda looks like the guts of a Klingon Agonizer, as seen on Star Trek. Some details and instructions for use at:

Be careful how you use it. It can really hurt.

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Well, that's what I had concluded (see my other posting). But now, I'm leaning back toward the amplified telephone idea.

I placed it near one headphone from a Walkman and it did an excellent job of amplifying it with the Waliman set at very low volume and providing a fairly decent, if low fidelity, output from its loudspeaker. If even worked 3 inches from a cell phone!

So, perhaps it's a multiuse device. :)

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Half of a baby minitor???

The original poster wrote

Waliman excellent typo :)

Ron