My Heathkit radio in the 70's

by neil
(eureka, ca)

I built a simple Heathkit am, fm, ham radio receiver many years ago, in the '70s. It used several tubes.

I built it when I was 13 years old. It didn't work after I built it.

I took it to the "Whitefront", a discount store, similar to "Zody's" to their radio tv repair department. The gentleman fixed it for me and it worked after he crimped inward the tube socket leads, some of which, were shorting on the aluminum chassis...you see, I had placed the tube sockets through the top of the chassis and then screwed them in. They sere supposed to be placed in from the bottom of the chassis, facing up, and then screwed it. That way, the terminals would not short on the chassis.

However, the radio worked as well as a less expensive radio does.

It did not have a beat frequency oscillator bfo, for listening to the ssb. ssb would come in really loud sometimes, especially from commercial radios such as whatever. without the bfo, the ssb sounds like duck talk. If it had a bfo it would have been a medium class receiver, as I could listen to radio free Europe, and so forth with my long roof aerial that I had made.