Featured Product Archive
The inventions and products featured on these pages were chosen either for their
uniqueness in the RF engineering realm, or are simply awesome (or ridiculous) enough
to warrant an appearance.
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Occasionally an unbuilt vintage Heathkit
item appears on eBay with really nice photos of the contents. In fact, I have a
Saved Search that sends me an e-mail whenever one shows up. This morning, a
Heathkit DG−140 Two-Station Intercom kit appeared on auction. The instruction
booklet has a publish date of 1972, so I looked for a copy of it on the WWW but
the only thing I could find was a PDF for purchase. Despite the 1972 date, it appears
it was 1973 when the DG−140 was first available. The 1971 catalog still shows the
previous version, the
DG−141 (which you might understandably think would be the newer model number).
There is a big difference in the chassis configuration from the DG−141 to the DG−140.
Per the 1973 Heathkit catalog, the DG−140 was priced at $29.95 ($184.91 in 2021
money - a whopping 6.2x factor in 48 years).
Heathkit products were well known for the completeness of its instruction manuals,
with clearly illustrated instructions. During the writing and editing process, Heathkit
employees were given pre-production kits to take home and build, while annotating
any difficulties or errors encountered. Doing so helped minimize the situation where
the writer inadvertently assumes his own familiarity with the process is shared
by the customer. Having built a few Heathkit products myself in the 1970s when I
did not have a lot of experience with electronics assembly, I can attest to the
user friendliness of the instructions.
Heathkit
stills sells many of its vintage manuals for around $15, which is what you would
pay on eBay.
Contact Info
Heath Company (Heathkit) Operations: PO Box 15, Ottsville, PA 18942 R&D/Mfg:
PO Box 3115, Santa Cruz CA 95063 Phone: +1 (831) 480-4368 E-Mail:
info.2015@2015.heath.company
Posted March 19, 2021
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