Not too sure if this should be under 'Modern technology' section, but seems more relevant here. Mods feel free to move if required.
I have been thinking of getting one of these for a while now, especially as there is so little on AM these days, and I really want to listen to material that is age appropriate to my valve sets. Seeing as the price for the kit has now come down a bit, I decided to buy one.
It is more years than I care to remember since I built a kit, and thought this would be a challenge for my failing eyesight!
The kit duly arrived nicely packed with everything needed to plug and play, including a power supply.
After settling down with a cuppa, I read through the build instructions to familiarize myself with the kit, documentation is good, but could do with a bit more info in places for novices.
So, time to make a start. The single sided PCB is of decent quality and component idents are clear.
The first step is installing all the resistors. this is quite fiddly, as first you have to sort them for value, then bend the leads to the right spacing to fit the PCB.
Following the steps in the build document, all resistors were fitted and soldered in place.
As it was getting late, and did not want to make any mistakes, I decided to carry on the next day.
The next step was fitting the capacitors, dip switches, inductors and IC's.
As the IC's fit directly to the PCB, I utilised a small Bulldog clip as a heatsink while soldering in place. This did the trick in shunting the heat away from the devices.
After lunch, I fitted the rest of the components such as the five transistors, crystal, led, trimmer, voltage regulator and the various sockets.
With the PCB now finished, I screwed it in place in it's enclosure with both back and front panels fitted, and it was ready for testing.
I connected the audio input to my MP3 player, fitted the supplied aerial wire, checked that the dip switches were in their default settings and applied power.
I breathed a big sigh of relief as it worked first time
I used several radios when testing, and am very pleased with the results so far, the audio quality is very good once the input level is correctly set.
The range is adequate to cover my house and workshop, which is all I want from it.
All in all it was enjoyable to build if a little fiddly at times, but even with my less than perfect eyesight, very straightforward to construct, and a good saving over buying one ready built.
Mark