"Radiosrfun" wrote in message
...
I built a couple of their kits - and they worked for what they were intended
to do. However - a friend of mine built a "receiver" kit - and it really
sucked. He called Ramsey to see about getting it "repaired". They wanted
like $75 to do so. He paid almost $50 for the kit. He didn't feel like
shelling out another wad of cash - so he junked it.

That's the problem with building some kits... to troubleshoot them yourself,
you may need equipment that many hobbyists aren't likely to have (e.g., an RF
signal generator in this case), yet a company probably really does need to
charge you at least $50/hour to have a tech sit down and troubleshoot
something that didn't work.

What your friend should do is sit down and spend, e.g., half an hour of his
own time going through and verifying all the components were inserted
correctly and all the solder joints look good. If that doesn't help, he can
probably still sell the kit on eBay for, say, $10 or more -- some people enjoy
the challenge of fixing dead boards.

I remember the days when those offering kits could only expect a kit builder
to have a multimeter and not even an oscilloscope -- some kits included quite
clever internal circuitry to help one align or fine tune their settings.

---Joel