[Mishmash] Whatever Happened To Heathkit?

[Richard Barth]

At 11:47 AM 2/26/2009, fatkinson at mishmash.com wrote:
>fatkinson at mishmash.com sent this article to you from Electronic 
>Design's Web site.
>
>----------
>To those of us 'techies' on Mishmash, this article will be a walk 
>down memory lane.
>
>I sure do miss Heathkit's products.  When I was a teenager, my 
>parents wouldn't let me order them because they were a kit.  But 
>that they were a kit was the whole point.
>
>                                 Fred

  I'm with you, Fred.  My first ham rig, way back when, was a 
Heathkit DX-20, a little two-tube box
running a 6CL6 oscillator/multiplier driving a 6DQ6A sweep tube final 
to about 50 watts in. When I got
my general and was no longer rock-bound, I added a Heath VF-1 VFO 
and, built from scratch out of an
article in Popular Electronics, a one-tube Heising amplitude 
modulator that I could run with the
-20 at about 30 watts in.   This was the golden era of sunspots, 
circa 57-60, when 30 watts of AM
would get you 30 over nine reports out of the West Coast and 50 watts 
of CW would literally
work the world with now (given the sad state of sunspots) incredible 
way-over-S9 reports.

Ah, those were the days.

And I remember well the assembly manuals they furnished: Connect R9 
to terminal 1 (NS).  :-)

And for all those to whom all this might as well be Greek, sorry.  My 
inner geek is showing.
Fred, Bill and maybe a few others understand.

Dick

Richard Barth *** W3HWN(at)ARRL.NET *** Silver Spring, MD