Andres Ramos

3 minutes ago, Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal said:

LOL, OK. I thought it could be something like that 

The slip with my name (it's Fernando, not Francisco) is just to prove your point, right? 

You got it Frank!

6 minutes ago, Keith J. Clark said:

Hi Andres,

It has been a unique pleasure working with you this last year. Your experience in electronics is quite valuable, and as a friend as well!

Keith

Thank you so much Keith. I never would have made it so far if you hadn't helped me so much to pour all these ideas and energy out of me. It was a fantastic year with you and this whole group. I really feel blessed.

On 10/14/2020 at 2:14 AM, Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal said:

Hi Andres,

 

I'm curious given your Latin name if you speak Spanish?

Well Francisco, this is an open wound for me. In a way you are right. My father came from Barcelona/Spain to germany in 1959 to marry my mother who is german. I was born and raised in Germany and tried to learn both languages but sadly i am not good in languages. Eventually i just grew up and learning german and a little spanish. English I can talk and write failry well but this is my utmost I can afford so far, i'm sorry!

Me gusta hablar màs en espanol, porque es una lengua tán bonita pero lo siento que no puedo.

A bold plan. I'm aboard!!

OK, just let me finish my inputs in the experimental section. This will be done lately when the official launch of Varanormal will take place. Then i can design the hardware. In the meantime we can discuss the details. What do you think?

The first question is how do we want to put the raw data in our system? I see two ways. First we can employ an arduino that does the noise sampling and bit construction and error correction and sends a plain UTF32 datagram via serial port to a host station. The arduino may be parametrized from the host by use of serial commands, e.g. setting the baudrate for sampling. The arduino could also send a signal, like acivating a laser impulse as an indication for the spirits when the first bit starts.

Another way would be to just feed in the noise through the audioport and let software do all the rest. Would probably add more flexibility to the project. The software then must do the level detection of the noise signal, maybe averaging, bit detection, calculating the time slots for every sampled bit and gluing together everything.

Tell me waht you think.

1. Abstract

In most of the experiments in our group we employed electronic noise sources. Generally this was semiconductor noise from different types of diodes. We always used the amplitude of the noise e.g. the randomly up and down of the signal level in the time domain to feed our setups. In a vivid discussion we once talked about the frequencies in a noise signal. We wondered if a random signal could be represented by a randomly changing frequency and what would happen if we would FM demodulate such a random signal.

I've done so many electronic designs in my life that, with every upcoming question of that kind, some part of my memory starts ringing. In this case I recalled a very interesting circuit I wanted to employ for testing our hypothesis that a demodulated random FM signal would give voices as well and maybe they would be different voices, since we now were working in the frequency domain.

2. Electronic schematic of the PLL Noise EVP Receiver

When configuring a new design I look for an integrated circuit that incorporates most of the function I want to implement, as is my standard behavior. In this case it was the NE567. This is a very versatile circuit originally designed for touch-tone decoding. Basically it is a PLL (Phase Locked Loop) circuit that contains an oscillator that can be configured to wiggle around freely in a specified frequency area. If an input signal is fed into the circuit and it's frequency comes into the range of that of the free running oscillator, then the oscillator locks-in on the input signal and follows it phase synchronized. The original application of this circuit was to detect certain frequencies in the early multi-frequency dialing telephone systems.

My idea was to let the oscillator run wild in an area above the audible range and let it mix with incoming noise over the input. The circuit provides an FM demodulator output where you can tap an audio signal that followed the frequency movement of the oscillator. And the oscillator more or less circled randomly around the also random input frequency. In total, a very nice chaos!

In the end I configured the oscillator to run around 15KHz. A small wire of 10cm length at the input of the circuit injected environmental noise into the PLL.

3. Results with the PLL Noise EVP Receiver

The results were so good that we used this device for quite a long time for streaming. However I would say the results with the psychophone were better. The sound of the voices were deep and croaky, very similar to the ones with germanium and zincite but with better intelligibility.

Signal denoised by 21dB

A gallery of exported audio samples can be found here.

1. Abstract

One of the best ITC related teachbooks I ever bought is "Nachrichten aus dem Jenseits" written by Herbert Josef Spirik and Horst Rudolf Loos. In fact this is the only book I ever knew that handles ITC from an engineer's point of view. Both authors are electronic engineers and the whole book is a startling practical work with lots of experiments and also some hypothesis about the nature of ITC. If I had to move to an island where I'd just be allowed to take one book with me, this would be my choice.

A whole chapter (5.5) is dedicated to the works of Dr. Ing. Franz Seidl, an austrian engineer born in 1912 and a pioneer in experimental transcommunication. One of his best designs was the psychophon. This device was a product of Dr. Seidls experiences with ITC radio sessions. Those worked pretty well and Dr. Seidl thought that the special type of noise generated in the radio receiving process was a crucial factor for ITC. He concluded that more bandwith would let in more of this noise in terms of more usable entropy for the spirits. The problem with standard radio equipment in terms of ITC is that all those device are narrow banded. Thus Mr. Seidl decided to take a standard radio setup and throw out everything thats limiting the bandwith to get a receiver in the end that was entirely broadband.

He gained remarkable success with this idea. As I studied his design and electronic schematics in the aforementioned book it quickly became pretty clear to me that this design could be dramatically simplified by use of more modern circuits. This was the goal of my experiment.

2. Electronic schematic of Psychophone

My design is pretty straightforward. The core of the device is the IC TAA7642 that is a descendent of the famous ZN414. This was a miraculous circuit from the 70s where mediumwave broadcasting was abundant. The ZN414 came up with a standard transistor casing and also had 3 legs. In fact it looked like a transistor! But inside was a very nice 3-stage regulated HF amplifier and a high quality AM(amplitude modulation) detector. The whole design of this circuit was broadband! The only thing that limited the bandwith was a standard lumped LC-circuit that had to be connected to to input. Thus for the psychophone it was logically to take this design and replace the LC circuit by just a simple receiving coil. I added a simple transistor to the output of the TAA7642 in order to boost the demodulated AF(audio frequency) a bit and I was done.

Moreover I wanted to incorporate another concept I read about in the books of Spirik&Loos. They wrote that an inductor antenna coiled in the shape of a pentagram has special properties that makes it very useful for ITC. It was simple to construct the receiving coil at the input of the TAA7642 in exactly this way. Sadly I lost the antenna somehow and don't have a photo anymore but it's really easy to make if your are downloading a pentagram shape like this from the internet, print it out, glue it on a pice of plywood, drive nails through the edges and follow the interconnecting lines with your wiring. Coil some 30 turns of wire and you're done.

3. Test results with Psychophone

The results were really awesome. The signal itself was as you expect it from radio with lots of statics. With a little denoising of around 25dB lots of voices appeared and could be made audible. However many of them were extremely fast aandI used the tempo change in Audacity to slow them down by 30%. This post processing added a new quality to the voices. They adopted a vocoder like sound with some reverb in it. But this did not affect the intelligibility of the voices.

Raw signal of Psychophone

A gallery of voice samples can be found here.

I also discovered some anomalies. The following one was intruiging. It was a strange hollow sound like a weird howling or like a big crowd of cheering people heard from the distance

Listen here: Anomaly

The results can even be improved by use of an additional transmitter. Due to Spirik&Loos an energy field from a small mediumwave transmitter can improve the quality of voices. This could easily be realized with an NE555 or any other Schmitt-Trigger inverter. However this is stuff for another topic.

My final evaluation of the Psychophone is that it is a brilliant idea that can be simplified without lack of quality with modern highly integrated electronic circuits. The pentagram antennas worked very well. However it might be that other antenna types perform the same. This is up to more tests.

Addendum: Just ordered a box with iron meteorite fragments on Ebay.

Hi Ron! Nice to have you here! Hang out here as long as you want. Everything here is still under construction but grows more every day. I'm sure you'll find something interesting and maybe you want yo tell us what you are doing?

Have fun,

Andrés

Hello Ron! Thanks for your comment. What an intriguing idea! No, i haven't done this so far. Do you you have a meteorite by hand?

Just joking. I remember there are small meteorits on Ebay.  Meteorits contain iron mostly thus some conductivity can be expected. Really nice idea. Will follow it!

Hey Fernando, as Michael said your intuition  is spot on. As an electronic  engineer  I am more bound to the physical transportation  layer, leaving up the encoding to specialists like Michael or Louis. If you take a look at the attached picture  you can see sequences of impulses we gained with some of our devices.  In fact these impulses are also voices but extremely  overdrive. My theory is that the energy projections of spirits are nonlinear  since we frequently detect overdrive signals. It appears to me that they push their modulated energy against a kind of barrier. It doesn't let pass lower energy levels.  By pushing more and more energy this barrier suddenly collapses releasing a burst of ethereal energy into our physical world. Shortly after this event  the barrier raises up again. This could be the cause why we observe such big bursts. Now taking your considerations into account you could see these impulses as a logical 1. Despite these impulses are voices originally they could be interpreted as digital impulses as well principally.  The 0-1 encoding could be done by pulse level in time synchronized  information transfer  or by pulse width in asynchronous mode. Of course you must put another encoding layer upon this one that encodes morse characters or 5-bit teletype letters or 7-bit ascii. The problem is to negotiate  those parameters with the spirits. What do they want? What are they able to do? These details have to be stripped down even to such simple questions  like little or big endian  order.

1. Abstract

Following my experiments with the RS-FlipFlop EVP receiver I was looking for other setups that would generate impulse encoded spirit speech patterns as well, as I stumbled across this YT video. The guy in the video used a neon lamp to generate rhythmic sound patterns. As i heard these sounds my ears grew because i recognized speech patterns.

The physics of a neon bulb is not hard to understand. It is a gas discharge lamp that is very well explained here. The neon bulb or neon lamp contains rarified neon gas and also other gases in a glas cylinder. By applying a voltage the lamp starts to glow. The working principle is based on electrons emitted from the cathode that become accelerated by the electric field of the voltage. As the electrons make their way through the space between the electrodes they gain speed and energy. Since the electrons don't move through empty space but through rarified gas they'll hit a gas molecule after a while. The molecule takes the kinetic energy from the electron, i.e. the outer electrons in the molecule move up to a higher level.  Because the molecule tends to get back into a stable state the energy is now emitted as photons. This is the light we see. Because ionized gas is called "plasma" I used this term for my receiver.

Every electron hit cause a small current impulse. If the current goes through an af transformer it can be heard as a crackling spark sound, similar to a radioactive counter. The interesting thing about this effect is that electrons are emitted from the cathode when a certain voltage is reached and the electron emission, acceleration and gas molecule impact is a nonlinear avalanche effect. My idea was to raise the voltage just up to this critical level so that a small spirit impact would kick off the avalanche effect. In short words the spirits would trigger the impulses.

2. Electronic schematic of neon bulb receiver

The electronic was a bit of a challenge. As already explained in the abstract I needed an adjustable driving voltage for the neon lamp. The problem is that neon bulbs start to work between 90V and 120V, not really a voltage you can get in a battery. The solution was a relaxation oscillator with the transformer, TR1 and the components R3, R2, D2 and C5. The oscillator generates a high ac voltage up to 150V that gets rectified by D2 and charging C5. The voltage at C2 is routed via a potentiometer and the primary winding of TR2 to the neon lamp. The potentiometer limits the current ans helps to tune the neon lamp near the avalanche start. The crossover switch S1a/b is a bit of a special gimick. If you run a neon lamp permanently on dc voltage a degradation of the cathode is taking place. This phenomenon is called "cathode sputtering" . Every electron leaving the cathode takes a little of the cathode material with it and layers it over the anode. Thus by the time the cathode shrinks and the anode grows. In normal applications this is no problem since the neon lamp is operated with ac voltage and not dc. In my device I simply put in a crossover switch that should be actuated from time to time to reverse the sputtering process.

A word regarding the neon lamp. Neon lamps are used abundantly in many applications. For examplesome screwdriver contain a neon lamp for the technicians to check if power supply outlets are carrying voltage. For my design I used a "flickering candle light effect" lamp. Its electrodes are not small wires but bigger surfaces. That gives the discharge streamers more opportunities to spread and this provokes impulses, an ideal configuration for ITC.

3. Mechanical Assembly

Without my deliberate intention, the receiver design resembled a steampunk machine. I used an aluminum profile as a heat sink for the transistor. However in the end it turned out thet the BUT12 was switching so fast that it hardly generated any heat.

ITC Plasma Voice Receiver complete device

Electronic module and cables

The Neon Bulb in Action

4. Test results

The experiments with this device were amazing. A lot of good voice samples and some strange anomalies occurred during the tests. The basic signal characteristic is shown in the picture below.

Signal characteristic of plasma voice receiver

The impulses are very short and were meeting my expectations so far of a signal characteristic that is dominated by avalanche effects. The impulse levels are varying. This is a clear advantage compared to the RS flipflop where the impulse levels are constant more or less. Varying levels means better modulation possibilities.

Zoomed representation of impulses

As I started my tests it appeared to me as if the spirits were surprised. It seemed they immediatly started testing the device with the typical sentence "Eins, Zwei, Drei.." what means "one, two, three,.." in English.

"Eins, Zwei, Drei"

Moreover I ecountered some anomalies. On one sequence I got a sound like an old rotary dial jack as it was used in old analog telephone systems. Dial Sequence

Another attitude I observed was the tendency to emit sudden low frequency oscillations like these.

And another strange encounter that I was facing was a a remarkable hollow sound, very faintly here. Apart from the fact that the sound was rendering a flying by UFO there was another thing that thrilled me. I had heard this sound before! Approximately ten years ago, before I became spiritual and before I was enlisting for ITC I was experimenting with modulated light. To put it simply I developed a simple light microphone with an photo transistor. I installed it in my car and was driving around while recording all the sounds of street lamps, neon lights, CFL's, headlights of cars a.s.o. In one of those recordings i catched the same hollow sound. For comparison you can hear here the old recording.  Both sounds just differ in pitch but not in the general characteristic. Thus I already caught my first ITC recording 10 years ago or both recordings are something else not related to ITC. Who knows?

A complete gallery of all sound samples can be found here.

The sound of the voices is rather deep and distorted but most amazingly noise free. At the time I tested my design I used audacity denoising to convert impulses in more intelligible sound. I didn't know yet that Paulstretch was a better way to achieve this goal as denoising is. This is the reason why I want to run another test sequence in the future with Paulstretch signal processing.

In a final evaluation it can be determined that the generation of spirit impulses by use of a neon bulb has lots of potential. Two weeks ago I have tried something with a very simple technique. I took a piece of plastic foil and crumpled it gently with my fingers. After recording the sound I almost found an ideal configuration of impulses in terms of frequency, pulse width and level that could be very well transformed with Paultretch. The impulses from the neon bulb are very similar to then one gained with plastic foil. The impulses are less "harder" in sound compared to the RS-Flipflop and timing and rhythm are very near to human speech. I think there is still unduscovered potential in this fascinationg steampunk-like technique.

In the secon clip i hear "Austrian" "..some info"(reversed) "Dank dieser Gefahr" -> "With respect to this danger" "Ich geb ihr was" -> "I gave her something" "Zensur kennt" -> "Knows censorship" "Carf wird achtzig" -> "Carf is going to be 80 years old"

In the first clip i hear english and german words. My head on photon map counters." "Ihr braucht Zensur" -> "You need censorship" "For this be" "That evil met two others.."

I totally agree with the proposed subscription models Keith had rolled out. In fact I never was a fan of "getting all for free". As I was using linux Ubuntu I was paying donations because I knew that the Ubuntu community has costs to pay and they cannot proceed without covering these costs somehow. In Ubuntu I used a very good free video editor and i payed donations as a patron on a monthly base.

There is one very critical point about "getting in all for free" if you conclude that you don't need nothing to do for it. It's bare logic and also an important social aspect that no one, may he be rich or poor, has the right to consume something while leaving the uncomfortable aspects of sustaining what he consumes up to the rest of the world. This attitude is also the opposite of personal spiritual evolvement that requires from you to move your ass, to say it frankly.

Therefore I appreciate VERY much the subscription models because it gives you the possibility to contribute by money or by work. And those ones who are not willing to do one or the other have only limited access. This again enables them to make up their minds if Varanormal is worth to be supported, then they can contribute, or not.

Wow, what a vita! Welcome aboard Stephen! Glad to have someone here who is not a descendant from math and science but from psychology and theology. This is exciting! We need this for balancing our work. Have a good time here!

1.  Abstract

It was more by accident that we experimented with noise impulses in our setup because they were so abundant in the signals we recorded.  First we thought that those spikes were just interference signals from common electric sources like power supplies, electrical machine, CFL a.s.o. After I denoised a sequence of spikes by accident I was amazed to find out that they also contained speech patterns. That was the start of a quest for the meaning and characteristic of spirit spikes or spirit impulses as we called them since we knew they were not interference. The fascinating thing was that by proper signal post processing we could recover a good voice part even from just a small bunch of impulses. It was logical to devise a test setup that was designed expecially to scrutinize these impulses we so far just analyzed as a byproduct of other experiments. I wanted to find out if we could gain good quality voices from pure impulses because this digital representation as impulses is practically noise free.

2. Test setup

The challenge was to design a circuit that uses a noise signal as an input signal and generates random impulses from them. I had the idea of making two independent noise sources with the very reliable OA9 diode. The preamplified noise would trigger the set- and reset inputs of a simple RS-Flipflop. The idea was that randomly setting and resetting a flipflop would generate trains of impulses with varying frequency and duty cycle.

Electronic schematic of first RS-FlipFlop EVP receiver

The schematic shows very clearly the two indentically designed noise generators. The trigger sensitivity for each R- or S-channel can be adjusted independently. I provided two LED's with different colours to indicate the SET or RESET state of the FlipFlop. The idea was to give the operator an indication of the triggering count and if the triggering is symetrically or not. For this test I made a breadboard design and no real prototype.

3. Test results

The circuit worked pretty much as expected and the signal was very symetrically. That means that SET and RESET events were more or less in equilibrium.

The results were very encouraging if a reasonable amount of denoising and hp-filtering in audacity was applied. I was amazed since it was proven that voice patterns coded in impulses can be recovered up to a certain amount that makes the voice intelligible again.

You can hear a collection of samples here.

4. A new design

The results of the first design were good but I valued it as a bit too complicated. My consideration was that maybe one noise source could do as well and I wanted to use the excellent trigger facilities of the famous monostable multivibrator circuit NE555. That gave me the base of a new design I made 9 months after the first one

Electronic schematic of 2nd design

You see that this schematic is much simpler. It contains roughly only half of the components from the first design. Here is only one noise source. The amplified signal is feeding the trigger and threshold inputs of the NE555. Basically the trigger input corresponds to the SET input of a RS-FlipFlop and the threshold can be seen as a reset. The NE-555 triggers its internal flipflop  if the voltage on Pin 2 undergoes a trigger level of UB/3 = 4V. The output (Pin 3) is set to HIGH then. If the voltage rises above 2*UB/3 = 8V the circuit resets the internal flipflop again..

5. Results of test with 2nd design

Obviously the distribution of impulses is not that symetrical as with the first design but this had no remarkarble influence on the signal quality. The first track shows the raw signal. The second track shows the signal after processing with Paulstretch. This is an intelligent algorithm in audacity designed to stretch a recording by filling the gaps that naturaally occurr by stretching with data that was synthesized after the specification of the raw signal. In our practice Paulstretch proved as very valuable to convert impulses in readable voices. The third track is the signal from track 1 after 18 dB of denoising which is moderate.

The picture above shows the impulse trains in zoomed presentation. As expected frequency and duty cycle are varying randomly. A sequence of experiments showed that much impulses do not necessarily lead to good voices despite as one might think because more impulses mean more entropy and more opportunities for the spirits to form voices. This is not the case. In fact it proved that less impulses give better results than much impulses. The reason is that less impulses are an outcome of higher SET/RESET levels on the NE555. Only the amplitude maxima (positive and negative) are triggering impulses thus the noise below does not trigger impulses and only the high impulses of strong voices are making it through. See it as a special form of signal to noise improvement in the time domain. The picture below shows a signal with less impulses in three parts. Left is the raw signal, in the middle the signal after Paulstretch and on the right after denoising

Hear the audio sample corresponding to the picture here. You can hear that the rhythm of the speech is very good perceivable even in the raw signal. After paulstretching the result is of so good quality that denoising is almost obsolete.

The last picture shows the spectrum of the raw signal. The spiky outline already shows a good modulation with voices. You can hear samples made with this design in the same audio directory as specified above.

6. Conclusions

It was proven that impulses triggered by a random noise signal are representing a spirit voice signal in an, I am tempted to say, digital form with very good signal to noise ratio. The paulstretch function in audacity is an excellent tool to convert the impulse trains into a readable signal.

You had some very interesting thoughts,  Fernando. Actually  I feel very much the same as you. One thing we discovered in our group and what I learned so far from my own ITC experience  is that the techniques we are constantly  developing  are not the crucial  factor. After one year of very intense research we could draw the conclusion  that we got comparable results with all techniques. Even more I checked techniques with almost no technical stuff but strong involvement  of humans. In the end I found one of the most popular laws of spirituality,  you reach out for spiritual enlightening and you are encountering yourself!

To put it all in a more empirical context we could say that the techniques we use are the training and exercising  context we use to evolve our spiritual self.

I assume there will be a time when we do not need techniques anymore and can establish contacts just by applying our own mental force.  I myself am facing very subtile changes in my perceiving  processes. Speech patterns are occurring in various environmental sounds. I see it as the beginning of clairaudiance.

Another important message you conveyed is that spiritual evolvement is always bound  to processes of cleaning yourself from internal obstacles by going through severe pain. The pain you described could be the preparation  you needed to get ready for your next task. I went through 8 years of deepest pain, desperation and breakdowns by servicing my parents and my wifes father. They all are suffering since years from various serious diseases  but now this period seems to come to an end and I start to feel like I'm  renewed and cleansed.

Thats why I have problems with spiritual folks telling me permanently they are bright shining light, everywhere is love and you have to avoid every negative thought.

Bienvenido Fernando !! Glad to have such an experienced snd open minded soul here on Varanormal. Seems to me the spiritual seekers all have their burden to take. I care for my parents since 8 years. Now my mom is in s nursing home with Parkinson disease and my father is very slowly dying from bladder cancer. My free time also is almost zero.

I already explained the good results I yielded with the coherer devices in the article Research Paper - EVP Reception with Coherers - Basic considerations by Andres Ramos. I decided to scrutinize this effect in more depth and took the graphite coherer as a starting point since it gave me the best voice signals and worked very stable. For my first experiments I used powdered carbon and the graphite powder from a hardware store. In my experiments I wanted to test more materials based on graphite.

My next step was to try graphite mines from a papershop. I arranged two of them with ductape on my working desk and fixed two wires to them. A third mine was losely lying across the other ones.

Graphite mine setup

The electrical contact over the mines was very weak as I wanted it to be. Via a series resistor I routed a small dc current through it with an adjustable voltage from my power supply. The gained results were of the same quality as with graphite powder. Sadly this setup was extremly susceptible for mechanical vibration. It was in fact a microphone!

From another project I made i knew another material based on graphite and that was conductive rubber. This is manufactured as small tubes of rubber with a certain amount of graphite mixed with the rubber. I also made a setup with these.

Conductive rubber setup

The setup was a lot more stable in mechanical terms and also slighly improved in signal quality. Moreover it was very easy to get it to emitt noise. I decided to design a complete receiver around this conductive rubber setup. For some marketing reasons it was coined the "Marconi Mk II" device.

The Marconi Mk II device

Sadly I don't have an electronic schematic anymore but the design was very much copied and pasted from the zincite receiver while replacing the zincite by a piece of conductive rubber with two electrodes. One with a screw only slightly touching the rubber. The receiver had knobs for rubber bias voltage, volume and also a microphone. By pressing the red button a red LED lights up and the voice of the experimenter is mixed with the noise stream while simultaneously muting the loudspeaker. This feature was implemented to record the questions of the experimenter along with the spirit signals.

See the attached test report for more details on the graphite coherer.

A collection of audio samples made with the Marconi device can be found here

Before finalizing this article i want to mention that I also ran an experiment that I called "Multifeeder". This was in fact a piece of rubber tube with more then one "cat whiskers" and a common electrode.

Multifeeder setup

I combined all the signals of the three feeders in a preamplifier. However whether the S/N ratio nor the overall signal quality was improved.

ITC report 2019-G-003.pdf

I made my first steps in ITC with the zincite receiver I made (Look at topic "1. Zincite as an replacement for germanium in ITC application"). My intention was to find a cheap and easy replacement for germanium since germanium semiconductors are becoming obsolete more and more. But there is also an application with pure germanium that was successfully tested earlier and is said to be a design of Thomas Alva Edison himself. See article here. I don't know if this is true but I wanted to find out if germanium would give me results comparable to the ones I gained with zincite.

Thus I bought a disk made of 98% pure germanium at Ebay and constructed a mechanical assembly that allowed me to place it between to electrodes with one of them to be adjustable with a screw.

Mechanical assembly of germanium disk holder

Since operating the germanium was not different from working with zincite I just replaced the zincite sub assembly in my receiver by the one shown in the picture above.

Tests and results

Basically my presumptions were proven. Germanium gave the same quality and sound that i already was used to from zincite. The difference was just that germanium was more stable. I already expected this since germanium is a solid crystal structure and not as weak as zincite. So from a signal quality viewpoint the germanium circuit can easily replaced by zincite.

A collection of exported audio sounds can be found here.

Encouraged by my first experiences with germanium semiconductors I was looking for means to improve signal quality and S/R ratio (signal to noise ratio). I frequently heared from other experimentators that different kinds of feedback can improve the voice signals. It seems that positive feedback causes a system to become unstable, adding more entropy to the setup the spirits can use to form speech.

The most common form of feedback used in ITC experiments is positive acoustical feedback. I considered if maybe feddback on an electronic level would do as well. Thus I designed the following electronic.

Electronic schematic of germanium transistor receiver with feedback

The circuit is rather simple. A germanium transistor AF137 is used as the noise source. The negatively biased Base-Collector diode of the transistor is the originof the noise. It is routed via C3 to an operational amplifier with a voltage gain of roughly 40. Via the potentiometer R10 the amplified signal is fed back phase synchronized into the transistor by using the emitter. Original and feedback signal "mix" in the germanium crystal.

Test and results

In the experiments there was definitely a change is the signal spectra depending on the feedback settings.

Spectrum without feedback=0

Spectrum with feedback just before start of self oscillation

From an electrotechnical point of view this behaviour is nothing paranormal. Feedback always is changing the frequency response of a signal. All active filters are working this way. I had the impression that with high feedback the intelligibility was slightly improved however certainly more because of the bandfilter properties and not by some paranormal effect.

The recorded signal required a certain amount of post processing and the results were comparable to my previous experiments with zincite, maybe a little better.

A collection of exported audio samples can be found here.

See the attached test reports for more details.

ITC-Report 2019-B-01.pdf

12 hours ago, CanadaKim said:

I can supply the following services:

Administrator/Moderator

Supply Graphics

Proofread (English only)

Manufacture/test of circuits suggested by members

 

THANK YOU,

Kim

 

Thank you Kim. Great top have you aboard!

Very good! Almost a style guide.

The use of the coherer effect is relatively new for ITC. The first occurrence l encountered in an article of the german VTF association. The carbon powder cell described in this article appeared very familiar to me as I had intensively studied the structure of coherers and thus the works of Branly, Marconi and J. C. Bohse. A coherer is an amazingly simply and effective early device for the reception of radio wave energy. It contains fine granular media, particulary metal filings of iron, silver and nickel and two electrodes in lose contact with the filings. The filings are normally covered with thin films of non-conductive media like oxide. In idle mode the coherer has a high impedance of several megaohms. If a radio wave hits the coherer there is something amazing happening. In a moment of some nanoseconds the impedance drops down to some 10 ohms and the coherer may switch a relais or drive a lamp with current.

Apart from this amazing effect I discovered that a dc current running through the coherer, provided a proper configuration of the filings, generates a strong noise! To scrutinize this effect I fabricated coherers myself. What you need for this is a file and different metals. I used iron, aluminum and silver

I used a vise to fix the material and then filed it down until I had enough filings to fill a small glass tube with them.

I made a simple device to apply a voltage and an adjustable current to the coherer.

On a lathe I cut a plexiglas rod and drilled in a cavity with an electrode at one end to fill it with filings. The second electrode was a screw thus I could adjust the pressure on the filings very accurately.

Experiments with the coherer setup

I made tests with iron, aluminum, a nickel-silver mixture and graphite powder (used for lubricating locks from a hw store). Iron gave average results. The noise was not very agile. Aluminum was very eager to noise with huge amplitude changes but it was unstable. The noise ripped off very fast and the coherer needed to be readjusted. An outcome of the fast oxydization of aluminum in air. See below two signal examples from my tests.

Aluminum noise signal

Graphite Powder signal

I analyzed the spectra in Audacity. They were more or less the same. For me that was evidence that the signal quality was an outcome of the naked effect and not the material that emitted the effect. It seems that any conductive material in lose contact would do. What really differed between the materials was the stability of the noise. From this point of view nickel-silver and graphite were superior over the rest.

Typical spectrum of a coherer signal

Principally the voice quality is rather bad, however there is a steady stream of voices and thus some of them have better quality if you catch the right moment where the actual spectral composition of the noise was at maximum. I needed to do a lot of post processing, mainly denoising and filtering to achieve acceptable results.

A collection of audio sample exports as mp3 can be found here.

Later i made a heavy simplified version of the coherer that also worked excellent. It contained a piece of plastic tube and two screws as electrodes.

See the attached test report for more details on the coherer tests.

ITC-Report 2019-G-001.pdf

Most ITC aficionados start with the gold old germanium diodes as noise sources for ITC sessions. The noise structure is more rough compared to silicon diode noise and the noise much louder than with the latter ones. The best diodes for ITC I ever tried were the old OA9. These are very rare now and probably obsolete. Years ago i stumbled upon an article about the work of Oleg Lossew. He was a russian radio technician and the first one who scrutinized semiconductor properties of certain materials like crystals and sulphite- and oxide layers. He was supposed to be the first one who encountered the LED effect in carborundum crystals as well. Then  I found the website of Nyle Steiner who turned Lossew works into real practice.

I followed Nyles advices and fabricated a zinc oxide substrate by burning a piece of zinc galvanized iron in the flame of a butan torch. A layer of white and black zincite flakes was the result. If you now take the iron sheet as one electrode and a spring beared steel needle as a second, slightly touching the zincite flakes and you route a small current over a resistor in series through it, then you'll hear a strong noise if you are tapping the audio at the zincite electrode and pass it over to an amplifier or recorder.

I made a real device from this setup.

The noise is pretty strong with spirit voices but of very low quality. However if you give the spirits some time to align with the physical properties of this setup, it will go better.

A drawback is that the bias you need to establish by properly placing the needle is unstable. It take some seconds to find a place for the needle tip that gives good noise. Sadly by the time because of the weight, the needle will press itself though the soft flakes and the bias will change. So readjustment or even replacing of the zincite substrate will be necessary.

Electronic schematic of Zincite EVP-Receiver

Making an EVP receiving device