English: Two diagrams of circuits of foxhole radios, DIY crystal radios built by American soldiers on the European Front during World War 2, from a 1944 article in a radio hobbyist magazine. The soldiers were forbidden to use ordinary powered radios, because the local oscillator radiated radio waves that could give their position away to the enemy. So they built crude crystal radios, which had no power source and so did not radiate. These used a safety razor blade touched by a battery carbon or pencil lead as a detector to rectify the radio current to extract the audio modulation which produced sound in the earphones. Blued steel razor blades had a semiconducting oxide coating that could conduct current in only one direction. The image shows two foxhole radio circuits. The righthand diagram has a detector consisting of a razor blade touched by two battery carbons, with a battery that applied a bias of a few volts across it to make it more sensitive. The lefthand diagram shows a safety pin with a pencil lead as a contact. In both circuits the capacitance of the wire antenna combined with the inductance of the coil to make a tuned circuit which allowed through the frequency of the desired station. Since usually only one local station could be heard, the radio was not tunable, the builder just adjusted the number of turns on the coil to pick up the station.