Haha I know! When I was even younger, we had a radio that could recieve SW,AM,MW,FM(in TV range as well). I used to hook up the antenna to various things like wire mesh or tv antennas etc and used to listen to short wave and AM for hours. I even got signals from far away countries, it was really fascinating!

Also I had seen some recon antennas in a certain campus (can't say much about that) when I was a kid. Those were like long wires hanging from towers. I believe they used to receive/decode SW/AM signals from far away. I realised this much much later in my life. But fascinating nonetheless. And adding to all these is SDR! That's a whole different thing.