How many here built kits in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's? :?: :mrgreen:

[electronicskip]

Originally Posted by stevehertz

I built a Philips Wireless Engineer kit transistor radio in the late 60s. Still looking for one now.

Omg! i saw one of those yesterday!! for sale at Beaulieu international autojumble! almost bought it

[Smithdoor]

Finding old kits online is posable .
I have Eico 435 I built in 1960's.
In 2017 I saw more than one kit never built from 1960's for the Eico 435.

Dave

Originally Posted by electronicskip

Omg! i saw one of those yesterday!! for sale at Beaulieu international autojumble! almost bought it

[E93AFAN]

At around 10 I started building simple TRF sets from designs in PW with parts pirated from my fathers stock of early sets, some worked after a fashion. In 1961 I got a school holidays job and bought a transistor radio kit from RCS (think that's what they were called) for about 30 bob. On arrival my elder brother, who designed and built transistorised proximity detectors for industrial use in hoppers, tanks etc., declared it would never work, he was right! I did not buy another kit, partly because of the failed first attempt, but also because the cost of Heathkit for example, which was the gold standard to me, was out of my reach.

Like others here I have built amplifiers, preamps, a.m. tuners, preselectors, LED clocks, clock alarms, test kit etc., from Mullard publications, RC and PW, virtually all worked well. After a break of 40 years I returned to the hobby on retirement and in the last 10 years have rebuilt many of the projects I constructed (and stupidly disposed of in the 1990s) from the 1960/70 period, which has given me much nostalgic pleasure.

Thankfully I kept a set of Denco and Wearite coils, which work equally well with valves and FETs, the challenge now is finding suitable IFs. The US is a good source of both coils and IFs as long as you accept premium rates for the item and shipping. We are well served for transformers by the likes of Primary Windings, RS and others and modern components are cheaper and better than those from the 1950s IMHO.

I have often thought about a modern kit, but a row of ICs on a PCB does not appeal, even though the results are almost certainly superior to my steam driven transistor and valve sets.

[G6Tanuki]

Pragmatically, the old introduction-to-radio by way of a crystal set or a simple regenerative receiver was obsolete by around 1990.

The things that youngsters wanted to listen to had moved on to FM and the HF ham radio world had also gone to SSB a couple of decades earlier, so cheap and cheerful kit radios were doomed.

The nearest things I can think of as the successors were the likes of Larsholt FM receiver boards sold by Ambit/Cirkit in the 80s and the similar IC kits using the Plessey SL600 chips and a KVG IF block filter to build a HF transceiver with something like a Motorola Application Notes PA on the back end to give you 100W of RF.

Dick Smith Electronics in Australia did some interesting kit stuff in times past.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by Smithdoor

Finding old kits online is posable .
I have Eico 435 I built in 1960's.
In 2017 I saw more than one kit never built from 1960's for the Eico 435.

Dave

Fascinating that you mentioned Eico, I remember being in the US in the early 70s where a few Hams had Eico gear.

The Eico 753 was nicknamed the drifty-fifty or the 7-drifty-3 because if you were working someone using one of those you needed to have your hand on the tuning knob to chase it along the band.

*NOT* a good example of a kit based radio.

[David G4EBT]

Originally Posted by E93AFAN

I have often thought about a modern kit, but a row of ICs on a PCB does not appeal, even though the results are almost certainly superior to my steam driven transistor and valve sets.

ELENCO, an American company, do an excellent range of kits.

Of particular interest is an AM/FM radio kit, which was I believe originally designed for use in US technical colleges. It comes with a 64-page construction manual which is a tutorial which explains how radios work, and how to test and align radios both with and without test gear.

It doesn't 'have a row of IC's' - on the contrary it has just one, an LM386 audio amp. The AM section of the radio uses 8 transistors, two diodes, and the one I.C. The FM section uses six transistors and to diodes. The manual explains the purpose of each component.

The radio isn't housed in a cabinet - it's built on a large PCB, with everything on the top and the bottom accessible for testing, alignment and fault-finding. I became involved with the kit back in 2016, when I helped someone who had no previous electronics experience, to build and test the kit. I made a little comb-jointed base on which to house it. It has a ferrite rod antenna for AM and a telescopic one for FM.

At the time, it was more modestly priced, and is now quite expensive at more than £50, but really, the kit should be seen in the round as a practical and theoretical course as an introduction into radio:

The AM/FM radio kit can be seen here:

https://cdn.robotshop.com/media/i/ib...-datasheet.pdf

The 64-page manual and tutorial can be downloaded without charge and is well worth reading. I learnt a lot from it:

https://uk.robotshop.com/products/el...RoCQJoQAvD_BwE

I've attached some pics:

Pic 1: Top view of the PCB.
Pic 2: On the mahogany base I made for the completed kit.
Pic 3: The 'magic wand' referred to on page 35 for aligning without instruments, which I made. (A nylon rod with brass at one end - steel the other).

ELENCO do other electronic kits, which they say as suitable for the age range 8 to 108!

100 circuits: Search for:' Snap Circuits Junior Plus - Build Over 100 Electronics Projects - SC-110'

Manual:

https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/2864853.pdf

750 circuits!:

Search for: 'Snap Circuits Extreme Plus - Build Over 750 Electronic Projects - SC-760'

Manual:

https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/2864856.pdf

Hope that's of interest.

[Boulevardier]

Very interesting links, David. Thanks for posting.
Mike

[David G4EBT]

Originally Posted by Boulevardier

Very interesting links, David. Thanks for posting.
Mike

Thanks for reading it Mike, and for your kind comment!

[Viewmaster]

I don't think anyone has mentioned TV kits.

In the 1950's Premier Radio in Edgeware road offered a TV kit using
the green tube, ex service VCR97.

I built the 9 inch Viewmaster TV from kit of parts for the various stages,
power, sound and vision and frame assembly etc.

Couldn't afford a new 9 inch tube so managed with a second hand one with a
1 minute cathode/heater short.

First time I ran it the vertical scan coil was reversed so I watched
the 8 o/clock news from Ally Pally with it upside down !
Those were the days.

[Smithdoor]

I do think so.
I have built a Oscilloscope Eico 435 from kit in 1960's

Dave

Originally Posted by Viewmaster

I don't think anyone has mentioned TV kits.

In the 1950's Premier Radio in Edgeware road offered a TV kit using
the green tube, ex service VCR97.

I built the 9 inch Viewmaster TV from kit of parts for the various stages,
power, sound and vision and frame assembly etc.

Couldn't afford a new 9 inch tube so managed with a second hand one with a
1 minute cathode/heater short.

First time I ran it the vertical scan coil was reversed so I watched
the 8 o/clock news from Ally Pally with it upside down !
Those were the days.

[Jez1234]

Anyone remember Josty kits? They were Danish. My local TV and radio dealer/repairer/hire outlet in Catcote Rd, Hartlepool when I was a kid stocked them (and put up with loads of visits from me asking silly questions, plus were my first supplier of parts when maybe 7-8).

There was a Josty Kit book called "Amateur Electronics" by Jan Solberg which came with a PCB the same size as the book with 10 snap off PCB's to build their cheapest and simplest beginners kits. A good marketing ploy! Not that I ever bought any as they were beyond an 8 year olds pocket money and my parents were utterly unsupportive (tried everything to put me off electronics in fact! To no avail). No idea what happened to the PCB but still have the book! It's a real nostalgia trip when I pick it up (-:

I only found out about a year ago from an old Practical Wireless ad on world radio history that in fact the tiny TV rental/repairs shop up the road from me was the NE UK distributor for Josty Kit! Hence I won't be overly surprised if only some of our Scandinavian members have heard of them.

[G6Tanuki]

Yes I remember Josty kits, they were horrible cheap stuff, well as their VHF receivers (both band_II FM and their airband equivalent were concerned).


Horrible.

Thankfully we had Ambit / Cirkit who did decent stuff, I still have one of their Larsholt Band-II tuner modules here, which was my FM-DX receiver of choice back in the 80s when I was feeding it from a Fuba UKA8 at around 60 feet and enjoying hearing French and German FM stations.

[Jez1234]

Utterly wrong!! They were top quality. FR4 PCB's and usual brands of good quality European components, often Philips.

This was the case in the early to mid 70's anyway which is the only era of Josty I've seen.

[G6Tanuki]

The one Josty kit I had direct experience of was brought to me by a business partner after his son had failed to get it going.

It was a 2 transistor superregen FM broadcast receiver, using a JFET and a traditional bipolar transistor.

The two transistors had been transposed, hence the non working.

With the right transistors in the right holes it worked, sort of.

But... Tuning was by a varicap with a skeleton preset pot across an unstabilised battery..... And the signal frequency tuned circuit was an unscreened spiral etched on the PCB.

Both of which conspired to make the thing subject to massive hand capacity and battery ageing drift. Always assuming you could tune it to a station using that preset pot in the first place.

I never got to measure how much RF energy it radiated back up its antenna but was really rather happy that they didn't offer airband amateur band or PMR versions of the thing.

Like I said, horrible!!

[jamesperrett]

Originally Posted by David G4EBT

ELENCO, an American company, do an excellent range of kits.

I'd echo this. While we haven't built the radio kit, my son has some of the other kits and has got as far as trying his own designs made out of their Snap Circuits parts. I expect that today's children, when they grow up, will look upon Snap Circuits kits in the same way as many around here look at the old Philips kits from the 60s and 70s.

[Graham G3ZVT]

This is the closest I can find to the one valve set kit I built as a youngster. It must have come from one of the radio shops in the Shudehill area of Manchester.



http://www.vintageradio.me.uk/kits/hac_k.htm
The valve is right, 1T4
Mine used a B114 battery not a B103.
The Denco coil is right, it came with one coil and the shop had an additional set which covered LW to 30Mhz.
It also had a steel case which enclosed the aluminium chassis, I cant remember if that was an additional purchase.
The front panel was pretty much the one shown except there was a "pressel" switch beneath the centre (bandspread) control to turn on/off the LT.

I don't think it was branded H.A.C. when I think of what it was called, names like Sky Master or Sky Champion come to mind, but I don't think there was an Ever Ready connection, apart from the battery.

This little set meant a lot to me at the time, until I repurposed the chassis as a Q-Multiplier for my R107.

Any ideas who was behind this kit?

[suebutcher]

My Dad like the idea of building radios and hifi amps from kits and saving money, and that got me into the hobby, but most of the 1970s radio projects from Electronics Australia we attempted were expensive failures. You need more than a multimeter to get a superhet kit working properly, but this was glossed over in the articles. The successes were the Sinclair Project 60, the E.A. All-Wave Two, and anything made with the Tandy Science Fair 201 project kit. I'm about half-way through reconstructing the E.A. 160 communications receiver to see how bad it actually was.

[Paul_RK]

Originally Posted by Graham G3ZVT

I don't think it was branded H.A.C. when I think of what it was called, names like Sky Master or Sky Champion come to mind, but I don't think there was an Ever Ready connection, apart from the battery.

Concord Electronics used the name Skyroma for several generations of single-valve kits before carrying it on into their transistor era, but your description doesn't sound close to any that I've seen. You've probably a fairly good idea of when your kit was produced, so a trawl through the ads in a World Radio History scan of PW from the right period - a pleasant way to spend ten minutes anyway - might yield a result, whether by identifying the set or finding the shop offering its wares. Unfortunately the details given are generally pretty sketchy. The RCS Telstar for instance appears on the inside front cover of this September '64 PW:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=...AAAAAdAAAAABAQ

Price 35/-, inclusive of the valve and a coil to cover 40-100 metres, other coils were available.

Paul

[David G4EBT]

I built several kits between 1954, when I started work aged 15, and had a few shilling a week to spend from my £2.35 a week wages, until 1960, with varying degrees of success.

A 'Highwayman' 4-valve attaché case portable, for which you could buy the bits as money became available. Never did get it to work. 1958, a Perdio pocket portable transistor radio, which likewise, you could by a few bits at a time - total cost of that was £9.50, which was a colossal amount back then, equating to £272 now. That too didn't work either.

I built two little radio kits that did work, namely, the RSC two-valve 'Acorn' portable, which look rather like a 'walkie-talkie' with its telescopic aerial. The kit could be built with just one valve, and was ready to take a second valve as funds allowed. The single valve kit cost 35 shillings (£1.75), which equate to £50.43 today, and the two valve kit cost 39/6d (£1.95), which equate t £54.40 today.

In addition to that, was the cost of a pair of headphones, which were fitted with a 4-pin plug which - when plugged in, switched the radio on. Acorn valves were plentiful and were often used is radio and test gear kits (signal generators etc), but with 6.3V heaters consuming 0.15A, they quickly gobbled up the four 1.5V cells. The HT was a hearing aid battery.

Throughout my teens, like many of my generation, weekend were spent cycling, youth hostelling and camping. The little RCS radio worked a treat and went with me everywhere.

It featured in Dec 1959 Radio Constructor Magazine, pages 364 - 368 here:

https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Rad...RC-1959-12.pdf

And at this link too:

http://vintageradio.me.uk/kits/rcsport.htm

(There were other RCS kits, which some may recall).

In 1957 I successfully built the Ocean Radio D5B 'Ocean Hopper' kit, which used a single 3S4 valve, the filament of which was 1.4V @ 100mA, so wasn't too greedy on HT batteries. It had two wavebands, operated by a crude lever switch, which worked well enough. It didn't use a recognised make of commercial coil, such as Osmor, REP, Denco. Weyrad or whatever. It cost 39/6d in 1957 = £58.00 today. If you didn't wish to build the kit yourself, they would build it for you, for 'only' 7/6d extra - £11.00 today!

Spare 3S4 valves were available for 10/3d (£15.00 today).

What became of those two radios I've no idea.

I've attached a circuit of the 'Ocean Hopper' which I found on internet and have cleaned up a bit, and also a pic of the front on the radio, which came with a paper dial to stick on.

Both radios were quite sensitive and selective, but would have benefitted from a slow motion tuning drive.

Happy days, recalled with much fondness. As A.E. Houseman so eloquently put it in 'A Shropshire Lad':

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Quite so.

[captainpugwash]

Mention of Concord Electronics in an earlier thread sparked a memory and a rummage has unearthed this kit.
I assume it is was sold by the same company. I think it it did work, I must do a rebuild !!
I may be wrong but I think it was advertised as a spy radio, probably a good concept hiding it in a cigarette packet but flawed by one design error-the tuning dial on the front.

David