[Scan-DC] How to build a radio while in a Japanese POW camp

[Andrew Leyden]

Fascinating interview here with a former prisoner of war who built a  
shortwave radio receiver while in a jungle prisoner of war camp in  
World War II.

http://www.zerobeat.net/qrp/powradio.html

Any DIY radio types want to try and recreate this?  They have some  
interesting instructions:

"The resistors were another problem. We found out that we could use  
the impurities in some of the tree wood and the bark, particularly  
cinnamon bark which was available by getting through the wire only  
about 2 feet and we could normally pinch that while the Japanese  
sentry was moving around.
      We used a piece of string with the material rubbed on it from  
the burning of the cinnamon bark with some impurities in it (we didn't  
have a chemical analysis); we weren't very fussed because most grid- 
leak resistors were about a megohm or thereabouts and we had no means  
or any way we could measure a megohm, so it was largely a trial and  
error thing to see if it would work. We made a number of these bits of  
string and tied them round different things to dry them out to get the  
thing going. Eventually about an inch, three quarters of an inch to an  
inch, was about the right order of things to get about a megohm  
resistance."