OK, it's not truly homebrew, but I bought a Ramsey HFRC-1 WWV receiver
kit last week and put it together last night.

A little background: when I was in junior high I put a couple of Heathkits
together. That's my total experience with commercial kits, and the
experience is several decades old. Since then
I've done a lot of homebrewing, and I've bought-repaired-sold several
used Heathkit rigs, but until this little radio, no more
kit building. By necessity I compare the Ramsey kit with Heathkit
standards in a few places below.

It's a very basic 10 MHz superhet receiver in a smallish package. It
has a built-in speaker (more on it below), power from battery or 12V
adapater, and an antenna input and external speaker output. There's
no tuning involved; it's a fixed-frequency receiver, and the only front
panel controls are power on/off and volume.

The kit itself is $40, I added on a $15 case and paid another $7 or so
in shipping. It arrived two days after I placed the order over the web.

PC board assembly was a breeze. The PC board was nicely laid out, the
solder mask is excellent, and the instructions were straightforward and
not too much different than a classic Heathkit. It took about an hour
to stuff and solder the board.

Putting the PC board into the case was a slightly more difficult matter.
The supplied speaker, if you put it on the PC board where there is space
available for it, blocks the screws needed to assemble the little plastic
case. Some RTV convinced the speaker to live elsewhere (glued to the top
of the case). A Heathkit never would've been like that!

Similarly, with a Heathkit receiver they probably would've given me
the plugs needed to run the radio. Instead a newbie without a junk
box assembling this kit will have to run to Radio Shack to get the
plugs for antenna and external speaker. Oh, well, Heathkit is no more,
and my junk box had what was needed.

The receiver itself works great. I plugged a random longwire and ground
into the little battery-powered receiver and instantly got ticks from WWV.
There's a test point (or you can do it by ear) for tweaking two variable
inductor transformers that do input matching and image rejection - those
are the only RF adjustments that can be made.

So, while Ramsey clearly doesn't live up to the good old Heathkit
standards in every way, it does come pretty close. The receiver was
clearly designed with kit-building in mind, and it does work nicely.
Maybe I'll try one of Ramsey's QRP rigs next.

Tim KA0BTD

Tim Shoppa wrote:
So, while Ramsey clearly doesn't live up to the good old Heathkit
standards in every way, it does come pretty close. The receiver was
clearly designed with kit-building in mind, and it does work nicely.
Maybe I'll try one of Ramsey's QRP rigs next.

Try Ten-Tec kits. (I don't think they get nearly enough press)

I built their 20m QRP kit a few years back. Nice unit. And very
reminiscent of Heathkit - in some ways even *better*. You build a chunk
of the circuit, then test it - so if you make a mistake, you don't have
to pull out layers of parts to fix it.
--
Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View (Nashville), TN EM66
http://www.w9wi.com

Tim Shoppa wrote:
So, while Ramsey clearly doesn't live up to the good old Heathkit
standards in every way, it does come pretty close. The receiver was
clearly designed with kit-building in mind, and it does work nicely.
Maybe I'll try one of Ramsey's QRP rigs next.

Try Ten-Tec kits. (I don't think they get nearly enough press)

I built their 20m QRP kit a few years back. Nice unit. And very
reminiscent of Heathkit - in some ways even *better*. You build a chunk
of the circuit, then test it - so if you make a mistake, you don't have
to pull out layers of parts to fix it.
--
Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View (Nashville), TN EM66
http://www.w9wi.com