The Rise And Fall Of Heathkit—And Rise Of SparkFun

I am a retired Engineer. I've been a hobbyist before, during and after college and during my working career. I have been retired 12 years and I am still a hobbyist. I've gotten interested in Audio, purchaset three books of about 600 pages each by Randy Slone, Doug Self and Bob Cordell respectively. I've been successful at building my own stereo amplifiers and several preamplifiers. I bought test equipment on line including a 100 Mhz scope and an HP distortion analyzer, some Audio voltmeters, frequency counter and an old HEATHKIT "VTVM". My amplifiers have distortion at or below the measurable limit of the HP 339A which bottoms out at 0.0012% or so at 1 KHz, a bit higher at higher frequencies. Of course discrete component audio amplifiers use the "old" components that mount thru hole style on a PC board. I've designed and purchased my own PC board for these amplifiers and have Bipolar Transistor, MOSFET and Darlington Bipolar transistor output stages in my amplifiers. I enjoy listening to my system and have received positive comments from other audio hobbyists and audiophiles. Hobby electronics is still alive and well. I built a Heathkit color TV set about mid 1970s. It arrived on a Wednesday so I spent evenings, Saturday and part of Sunday following the VERY GOOD instruction manual. When I finished I inspected the wiring and foune one unsoldered connection, verified that it was correct and should have been soldered. When I turned the set on and tuned to a local channel there was a picture in sync and in color! A couple hours following the instructions for fine tuning (all without any required test equipment) had the set working quite well. We used it for several years. I built a number of kits from Heath, Eico and Knight over the years.\ Thank you, Lou Frenzel for your interesting articles .

Hi Lou, As a vacuum tube hobbyist from the age of 8, transitioning to the first Raytheon CK722s at 11, I'm one of those few electronics nuts who's never built a Heathkit nor used a 555. After moving into our new house, I've just unpacked an old Heathkit catalog that I didn't even know I had, buried with ancient articles from Bob Widlar, Jim Williams and Bob Pease. Speaking of old Commodore and Altair ads and articles squirreled away for later reading, the really funny one was "Would You Really Pay $30,000 For a New Rolls Royce?" The only real kit I ever bought was an RCA 1802 COSMAC development board from Santa Clara. As a Maryland resident, I asked myself "Where is this place?". Three years later I was living in Santa Clara County, spending a lot of my time in Stanford's Varian Brothers' Physics Library, looking at, no less, ancient vacuum tube books. I was forever hooked on Karl Spangenberg. Keep up the good work. Regards, Ron