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Heathkit manual


Stuphedd
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Heathkit? That brings back memories. I built a Heathkit FM tuner and a remote anemometer/wing direction indicator for the sailing club years ago. I wasn't interested in radio control then but I don't recall one at the time. Presumably it was 35Mhz? Or even 27Mhz?

Two work colleagues designed a phase-locked-loop stereo decoder which was published in Wireless World and I fitted one to the Heathkit FM tuner replacing the one using an analogue sytem. They tried to interest Plessey in the design but it was rejected ... then some months later they produced an integrated circuit decoder using the same principle.

Geoff

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Here's the review from the Oct 1968 edition of the RCM&E, it may be of interest to those who remember it & an education for those who don't. The price of £130-10s is the equivalent of £1,945 today for a 5 channel build-it-yourself outfit which rather puts in perspective the costs mentioned in a concurrent thread.

heathkit 1.jpg

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IIRC I was on about £1200 pa back then so £130.50 is certainly a big investment (and possible one reason all my spare cash went into motor cycles rather than RC back then - we'd just married!). At the time planar silicon transitors were taking over from germanium and the only integrated circuits I knew of were operational amplifiers (SGS muA702) and they cost about £30 a throw (and were notoriously unreliable because of some internal corrosion called purple plague).

Things have moved on a lot in the last 50+ years.

Geoff

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