I was working on the 27 MHz oscillator for testing the regens, and I thought it would be a good idea to turn the carrier off for a small fraction of a second every 1 or so seconds. So I built a two transistor flasher with a third transistor to invert the pulses. Instead of mostly off with an on pulse every second, the output is mostly on with a very short off interruption every second.
I built the circuit and I put a LED on the output and found that it was always off unless I touched the base of the first transistor. I found that the two transistors had too much gain, so I added the 22k resistor as a collector load resistor for the first transistor. The circuit started working properly. The interruption rate is 1.4 per second.
I got the Suntech AM-FM-SW Radio for $20. It’s so cheap and the performance is seriously lacking. The FM band has images that seem as strong as the stations, so I put the extendable antenna down, and the performance wasn’t as bad. But then I can’t hear the difference between the quiet spots on the dial and the unmodulated carrier of my oscillator. So now I have my oscillator powered by the interruptor circuit, and the short interruptions make it easy to tell the difference between the carrier and other signals.