[ARC5] [Milsurplus] Carbon mic pops

[Robert Nickels]

One of my benefactors as a kid was a neighbor who worked for the phone 
company and who'd supply me with #6 dry cells and old phones. I rigged 
up all sorts of contraptions using those elements to make telephone 
intercoms that I quickly learned I could leverage in lieu of writing 
science papers and whatnot.    Not knowing what I was doing but just 
wiring stuff up until it worked, I learned that more batteries in series 
= loudness but that leaving them connected = dead batteries.   So I'd 
wire in "push to talk" switches that could make and break the current 
and found that the "click" was loud enough to also serve as a signalling 
or "code sending" method. (Not that I knew any code, but it sounded good 
in my pseudo-scientific explanations).    So in my case, the carbon mic 
click was a feature, not a bug ;-)

Then I got hold of a crank type phone magneto...literally.   That took 
"signalling" to a diabolical new level.

73, Bob W9RAn