Has anyone one of those horribly cheap pocket amplifiers meant for listening sounds from 100? feet away that were sold by the 99c stores about 10 years ago ?
It was about a zippo lighter size for the shirt pocket with an earphone, those were the years they had equally horrible FM radios for 99c too.
There are better on the market but cannot find those cheap ones anymore.

Edit: adding a picture ----> https://s3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/...enfs.com/en-US/blogs/digitalcrave/Spy-Ear.jpg

 

Cute, but I've never seen one.

 

There's a simpler solution. You can hear a squirrel a mile away:


John

 

Has anyone one of those horribly cheap pocket amplifiers meant for listening sounds from 100? feet away that were sold by the 99c stores about 10 years ago ?
It was about a zippo lighter size for the shirt pocket with an earphone, those were the years they had equally horrible FM radios for 99c too.
There are better on the market but cannot find those cheap ones anymore.

Edit: adding a picture ----> https://s3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/...enfs.com/en-US/blogs/digitalcrave/Spy-Ear.jpg

I think I may have had one for a while and I may have reverse engineered a schematic for it. If I have it, I'll post it but if I recall it was a two-transistor design.

 

I've came across a number of those things over the years. Most were either a two or three transistor high gain amplifier or a LM386 set to near max gain.

The only thing I found the good for listening into was my clothes pockets rustling around and rubbing on the device as I moved. Long distance sound was completely drowned out by that.

 

I have a few of them years ago and I managed to duplicate the circuit on a vero board just to see if it can be improved...

Really surprised to see that they are still available on our local eMarket. Only slightly more expensive (US$3.50) here.