posted by
hubie
on Friday November 15, @10:06AM
from the They-don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to dept.
from the They-don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to dept.
The history of Heathkit, part 1 and part 2
If you came of age in the 1960s or 1970s and then later became an EE, chances are you're more than casually acquainted with Heathkit. Many engineers started their budding careers by building one or more kits made by the Heath Company. I certainly did. When I stumbled across a brief interview with Chas Gilmore, who joined the Heath Company in 1966 as a design engineer and worked at the Heath Company on and off for more than two decades, eventually becoming VP of product development, marketing, and sales, I knew I needed to interview him.
Teenage me built a shortwave radio and a HAM transmitter for myself, and a TV for a neighbor.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Friday November 15, @12:10PM (2 children)
I built a GR64 AM/CW/SSB receiver covering MW/SW up to 30MHz in the 1960s. It was probably rubbish - but it was my first SW radio and it opened up a whole new world for me. My father mounted a war surplus vertical whip on the side of the house, and also buried some copper cable to provide a better earth. Using the ATU from a former 19-Set (war surplus armoured vehicle fit) [wikipedia.org] I listened for many hours to radio hams all over the world. I still have the SWL cards that I received.
I never had a contact from the Artic or Antartic land masses acknowledge (though I did receive a SWL card that originated inside the Arctic circle so I was content with that). But every other continent was heard on a set up that should barely have been able to hear the local radio stations!
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday November 15, @02:42PM
When I was younger my Dad was into ham radio, we part of a local club and everything. Our whole family got at least the intro level Technician License. It was quite apparent that I was never going to be a Ham. (Talking to random people hasn't ever been my thing.) Though, I did participate in some of the club events. It's been quite a few years since any of us have been active and I let my license lapse a long time ago. My Dad however did for quite a while enjoy contacting people across the globe. There's still an interesting part that Ham Radio operators can play with local disasters and as was still done with "weather watching" for the radiologists. Though, perhaps that wasn't a specific Ham Radio thing, it was something that our club did get into.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday November 16, @01:26AM
I built a GR64 AM/CW/SSB receiver...
I may have built the same receiver. I wanted a ham license but couldn't learn Morse code. I could ace the rest of the test.
I also built a Heathkit guitar amplifier. Its schematic and assembly instructions were faulty. They didn't have polarized plugs back then, so there was a double throw power switch with an off and two ons; the wrong way introduced a hum. But the switch didn't work correctly, you had to reverse the plug to stop the hum.
Studying the schematic I saw that it didn't make sense, so I rewired the switch to what looked more logical. It then worked. They screwed up, and this sixteen year old kid was damned proud of himself!
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Friday November 15, @04:39PM (1 child)
They were relevant into the 80s when I was young, and even much later in the 90s they were still important for kids and noobs because you'd find them in the cheap stuff piles at hamfests. Now a days its all about boomers selling to each other on ebay for ever increasing prices much like the real estate market. But heathkit was important to kids and noobs right up to Y2K ish era.
Two comments about the article:
The wafer switch as automation cracked me up. As an example of wafer automation, Heathkit used to sell an excellent regulated linear power supply with high current, high voltage, high efficiency... yet... it was linear. You'll be told in school the "only way" to make a linear lab supply is make a high current high voltage unregulated supply then the transistor linear regulator will drop an amount of power equal to the voltage drop across the regulator times the current which makes wide range linear supplies "impossible" or requires switchers or all kinds of falsehoods. Because if you want a 0 to 50 volt power supply that outputs 0 to 3 amps under worst case scenario if you tried to run a 3 volt flashlight at 3 amps the regulator would have to dump (50-3)*3 = about 150 watts of heat which is a bit much. Heathkit's solution was to ship a multi tap transformer, like 10 or 15 taps, and a wafer switch with a zillion positions and in the 0-5 volt range you'd feed the linear regulator with only, perhaps, 7 volts and worst case a short circuit would only dissipate 21 or so watts, no big deal even at that time (surely a 50 watt audio amp would dissipate more heat...) Building in current limiting also fixed the problem of overheating due to short circuits. I never built one but it must have been an absolute bear to assemble as each switch position had a custom transformer tap, voltmeter range, and min-max voltage limiting, there must have been at least 6 poles times "a dozen or so" ranges might have been 72-ish connections to solder to the front panel just for that one switch?
Another comment is the headline highlites the "fall" of heathkit and most people get that wrong online. To people that don't experiment, Heathkits were like buying a themed lego, you'd build it once, then WTF and hope to sell it to a collector or something. In the days before PCBs and automation you could actually save money assembling your own hardware but that's long gone. Where the Heathkit mentality never disappeared was stuff like entire books of collected mods and upgrades for the HW-7 / HW-8 / HW-9 radio series where the base kit worked but people loved to mess around and modify and optimize and upgrade them into infinity. I was part of the HW-9 generation but never quite got around to buying/building/modifying the heck out of one. Anyway the kits that you could personalize or modify or extend or mess with were incredibly popular and remain so to this day. A boring commodity item like the bottom of the line IP-18 power supply that I built and owned for maybe 30 years has very little appeal either when it was new or now, because there was nothing to modify or change or mess with. To emphasize, to this day in 2024 there are websites about HW-8 mods to install a SWR meter internally, to install an amplified speaker internally, to install a morse code keyer, to add a digital frequency dial readout, etc infinitely, but nobody cares about the old IP-18 which was just a generic lab benchtop supply, IIRC 0-20 volts up to an amp. What made the HW series of radios popular is the kit was not hyper optimized to absolute minimum size making it impossible to modify or upgrade; this is a mistake being made today with modern electronics kits. Leave space for people to F around and they will spend infinite hours Fing around and talking to people who buy their own kit to also F around with. Leave no space or chance to modify, basically you are the assembly robot, and nobody will buy it, although old timers will complain about kits being "gone" and "nobody is interested". When the actual problem is modern hyperoptimized kits suck.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15, @10:22PM
> might have been 72-ish connections to solder to the front panel just for that one switch?
Didn't build one of those, but my brother and I did built their top-of-the-line audio receiver, AR15. 50 watts/channel, big numbers for c.1970, like this, https://www.ebay.ca/itm/155520717263 [www.ebay.ca]
Your comment above reminded me that the front panel included a row of stacked pots and multi-gang rocker switches. Even keeping wire length to the barest minimum it was nearly impossible to squeeze the front panel into position--all those wires smashed together did NOT want to fit into the available space.
It worked fine until one of the large output caps started to leak.