Maybe you were smarter and got a money order or placed the order COD (cash on delivery), but it was still going to take time. You probably sent a check, waited for it to clear, and then waited for the parcel to arrive. But $70? Might as well have been a million for the kids buying P-Box kits.Įven if you had the money unless you lived near a Heathkit store - there were a few - you had to order something and that was a lot harder and took longer without the Internet. Sure, it looked like a real radio and probably performed better, too. On the other hand, the cheapest shortwave receiver in a 1976 Heathkit catalog was nearly $70. Sure, they cost more, but they generally looked like something you bought ready-made if you built it right. Heathkit, for example, had great kits with amazing manuals. These projects were simple and useful and inexpensive. But many of them have tiny components, ICs, or rely on some complicated “magic chip” (a preprogrammed IC). It is true you can get lots of beginner-level kits today. That didn’t include other parts though, but - of course - you could buy them all at Radio Shack. There were also other kits that didn’t use P-Box, including a bunch of PCBs for a buck or two for projects like power supplies and stereo preamps. This page and the next one are where I pulled the data for 1975. If you want to see all the kits, there is a site with scans of many old Radio Shack catalogs. They had springs that you would push down, insert a wire, and then the spring would clamp the wire. You can see them in some of the pictures above. There were little aluminum terminals used for off-box connections. Made a mess of your iron and also released oh-so-wholesome fumes. You were told to use your soldering iron to make holes for the things like pots. In fact, the shortwave radio was a few bucks more than most of them, although there were a few that were even more, but - in 1975, at least - none of them were over $9. In 1975 there were twenty of them, but over the years there were about thirty different kits. #Stereo receiver radio shack movie#You might think $7.95 is crazy cheap, but that was at least a tank full of gas or four movie tickets in those days, and most of us didn’t have a lot of money as kids, so you probably saved your allowance for a few weeks, did chores, or delivered papers to make $8. On the left, you can see a picture of the radio from the 1975 catalog. In those days, you could pick up a lot of stations on shortwave and it was one of the best ways at the time to learn more about the world. One of my favorites was a three-transistor regenerative shortwave receiver. #Stereo receiver radio shack Pc#There was at least one that had an IC, but that came premounted on a PC board that you treated like a big component. The perfboard was pretty coarse, too, because the components were all big discrete components. So you bought the kit - which might be a radio or a metal detector - opened the box and then built the kit using the box as the chassis. It was like a piece of perfboard, but made of plastic, built into a plastic box. P-Box was the kind of box the kit came in. The obvious questions are: What’s a P-Box and why do I want one? But the kit wasn’t to make a P-Box. While Radio Shack never gave us access to the variety and economy of parts we have today, they did have one thing that I wish we could get again: P-Box kits. If you are under a certain age, you probably associate Radio Shack with cellphones.
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