When I was a kid, I did build a crystal radio, and I also built a Heathkit shortwave receiver. However, the Heathkit wasn't a success. The main reason for that was I wanted to spend hours in a quiet room working on it, but my parents and my sister didn't like that and we always ended up fighting whenever I wanted to work.
They wanted me to just drop what I was doing and go swimming when my sister did, which I couldn't stand. The excuses for my having to swim included I needed exercise, and needed to balance my activities, which made little sense to me because the amount of time I needed to have enough exercise to be balanced just happened to be whatever amount of time my sister spent swimming and it had to be done with her. Sometimes I was 2 or 3 times a day. They'd even threaten to take the kit and throw it in the trash if I didn't drop what I was doing to go swimming when my sister wanted me to. They wouldn't even compromise on swimming at a preset time for a certain number of hours, the only way they'd accept it is me being at my sister's mercy, dropping my activities for swimming at her whim. My swimming on my sister's command had some sort of sacred status to them that I will never understand.
I got it finished, but it didn't work, so it had to be taken in for repairs. After that, I gave up on electronics, kits, etc., because I didn't want to fight anymore. I would occasionally read the magazines are look at a Heathkit catalog, and all I could remember was how I had to fight to build something I was perfectly capable of building if I had been left alone to work in peace. It was like my crime was having my own interests.
I didn't touch another electronics project for nearly 10 years when I decided to try changing out a modem in a PC. A few years after that, I transplanted a new motherboard into an old PC, which was also fun. Later I started building and modifying my own computers and even though it wasn't Heathkit, it was still fun and since I lived on my own at that time, I was finally free to work in peace.
I'm also a ham radio operator and like to experiment with wire antennas. You never know what you're going to work with just a piece of wire in the air, or in the attic. I spend most of my time on digital modes now, alot more interesting, alot more fun.
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PrisonerSix
"I am not a number, I am a free man!"