“Definitely worth your while if electronics, filtering and mixing are your thing. A word of caution though, this is a advanced kit and a signal gen. and oscilloscope will be extremely useful. I successfully got the AM section working, but the FM was a bit of a pain since my signal gen. only went up to 25MHz. Other than that it was blast to solder together and troubleshoot. Be prepared to re-read some sections in the manual as they are worded a bit odd. A Panavise is also a must have for this kit!”
“I bought this for my 12yo daughter. She was becoming tired of the artsy-crafty projects and I wanted something with a little more reward to it. This was perfect. After a dozen joints she was confident enough to put it all together herself so I left her to it. About 7 evenings (about 1 hr per evening) later we tweaked the inductors and it worked first time!We didn't have more than a multimeter as test equipment and in any case she just skipped the measurement stages. The engineering aspects of radio design explained well in the instructions were not so interesting to her but that didn't matter. She's proud to have built her own radio.Now she's looking for other electronic projects to do.EDIT: After the first page of the instructions my daughter complained that the soldering was difficult. I had a quick go and agreed the eco-friendly lead-free solder supplied was awful at any iron temperature. I gave her some old-school multicore rosin flux tin/lead solder and after that she was able to make shiny good joints every time.”
“The solder included is pretty bad quality, seems like it has hardly any flux. The board is poorly constructed, the connections don't transfer heat very well making it additionally hard to solder on. The booklet that comes with it tries to simplify everything to the point where you need to do extra research to really understand the underlying concepts, and the way it lays down assembling the board kind of cuts through how useful it is to read through the schematic yourself in order to understand how everything is connected and why.”
