By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor

This week, Surfin’ considers those other vintage ham radio kits.

Last week’s story about Heathkit’s re-entry into the kit business caused many of you to wax nostalgic about those bundles of parts from Benton Harbor.

Heathkit has quite a following, as evidenced by the proliferation of Heathkit-related websites. The Heathkit Virtual Museum is probably the best representative of that bunch, but what about the other vintage ham radio kits? What about the EICOs, the Knight Kits, et cetera, et cetera?

Ken Kaplan, KB7RGG, comes to the rescue with his Nostalgic Kits Central, which covers those other kits that showed up in the pages of QST and Popular Electronics in the second half of the last century.

Meanwhile, over at the website of Nick England, K4NYW, there is a page full of photos that Nick has collected from eBay and other sources, showing you what vintage ham radio kits looked like. So check out Nick’s Post-War, Tube-Type, Ham Radio Kit Gear webpage.

And near and dear to my heart were the Remco radio kits, which had something to do with me getting radio-active way back when. So here is a cool Remco radio kit television advertisement from that era. By the way, those $3.95, $6.95 and $9.95 circa-1960 kits translate to $29.45, $51.81 and a whopping $74.18 in 2011 dollars!

Until next time, keep on surfin’!

Editor’s note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, built Aurora monster kits before he built Heathkits. To contact Stan, send e-mail or add comments to the WA1LOU blog.