Part 2 of this article series covers a period of explosive growth for the Heath Company as its amateur radio equipment kits captured a larger and larger share of the market. This article series is based on a presentation by Chas Gilmore (W8IAI), a life-long Ham who joined the Heath Company in 1966 as a design engineer and worked at the Heath Company for more than two decades, eventually becoming EVP and General Manager.

Chas Gilmore: In 1962, the Heath Company transitioned to a new era. Schlumberger, the oil field testing company, acquired Daystrom, a holding company that owned Heath. Schlumberger acquired Daystrom because it owned Weston instruments, a premier electronic instrumentation company at the time. Schlumberger wanted to add Weston’s expertise to their field measurement technology, because their primary business was measuring what goes on inside a drilled oil well. Along with the deal came this little electronic kit company in St. Joe, Michigan: Heath.

The 1960s were years of rapid growth for the Heath Company. By 1961, Heath was printing 100-page catalogs, and some pages were now in color. There were 180 products in the catalog, with 29 of them being amateur radio products. Thirty-six of the products were instrumentation, which was always a very large product line for the Heath Company. Many of the products were audio products. That was really the heyday of big-time audio for Heath. At the time, not many audio products came from Japan, much less China and other far eastern areas. A few premier audio products came out of Europe.

Heath also had some marine products by then, so the company acquired a cabin cruiser, which sat in the Benton Harbor/St. Joe marina. The boat allowed Heath to test its marine products – which included marine radio telephones, depth sounders, fish finders, all kinds of products of that nature – out on Lake Michigan. Heath also offered a series of educational products, some automotive products, especially ignition testers, and some Citizens Band (CB) radio products. The CB gear caused a lot of good amateur radio operators to grind their teeth at the very idea, because the Citizens Band was created out of the old amateur radio 11-meter band. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a lot of resentment in the Ham community because the Citizens Band had “stolen our 11-meter band.”

In 1961, we started to see a series of new products in Heath’s amateur radio line. That’s when Heath introduced the Mohawk RX-1 receiver. Now we’re getting into radios that begin to support single sideband (SSB). These receivers incorporated much better tuning resolution, frequency stability, IF sharpness, sensitivity, and general operating features. These new radios were quite competitive with other high-end amateur radio products. Prior to this, Heath’s radios had really been designed for AM, or maybe just CW. But Heath did not integrate SSB into its amateur radio products until the 1960s. The companion Apache TX-1 transmitter was another beautiful, beautiful radio. These radios covered 160 through 10 meters.

Heath introduced the Mohawk RX-1 receiver and Apache TX-1 transmitter in the early 1960s. The Mohawk kit sold for $299.99, and the Apache kit sold for $252.50. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

During this period, Heath introduced the Warrior linear amp. It took two men and a boy to carry that thing around. It could output a full one kilowatt for CW and sideband, 500 watts for AM. That transmitter only covered 80 through 10 meters because 160-meter operation had some rather significant power limitations.

You could use the Heath transmitters on SSB if you had the SB-10, an SSB adapter that used phasing technology rather than filtering technology to achieve SSB operation. You could use the SB-10 with the DX-100 or the Apache transmitter.

Heath also introduced a series of mobile radios. There was a matching pair, consisting of the MR-1 receiver and the MT-1 transmitter, as shown below. As you can see, it would not be very easy to install them in today’s cars, which mostly have center consoles. Bench seats are things of the past.

Heath’s first mobile amateur radios included the $119.95 MR-1 receiver kit and the $99.95 MT-1 transmitter kit. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

Heath introduced both 6-meter and 2-meter mobile radios: the HW-10 Shawnee and HW-20 Pawnee, in 1961. Heath also released a set of mobile sideband radio kits, the HR-20 Receiver and HX-20 Transmitter, in 1962. You’ll notice there was a theme at the time of using native American tribe names for the various radios.

Another amateur radio series, which was very popular and sold in tremendous numbers, was the “Benton Harbor Lunchbox” series. As you can see from the picture below, the informal name came from the shape of the product package. As shown, the Heath catalog often reproduced the product schematics during the 1960s.

Heath introduced the portable Benton Harbor Lunchbox radios for the 11-, 10-, 6-, and 2-meter bands during the 1960s. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

The first of the radios in the lunchbox series was an 11-meter CB radio. The design very quickly evolved into the low-cost Tenner, the Sixer, and the Twoer, for 10-meter, 6-meter, and 2-meter AM only operation. They used a super-regenerative receiver with a 3.5- to 5-watt transmitter. These radios were totally self-contained and came with a microphone, the power supply, speaker – the whole nine yards. At $44.95, they were very economical.

The 2-meter and 6-meter radios in the Benton Harbor Lunchbox series were the ones that lasted. They ran until 1971. They were very nice little radios, although the receiver had some problems. The regenerative receiver used an oscillator that could be received by other Hams if they had a top-end VHF receiver, because the regenerative receiver radiated. It was a little transmitter in its own right.

The Heath catalog included several interesting Ham accessory products from 1961 to 1991. The Heath Cantenna was designed by a Heath engineer who later became an engineering section manager. He was the guy who hired me as a Design Engineer in 1966. At the time that he designed the Cantenna, he knew nothing about amateur radio. It was just a new product design project that was handed to him when he started with Heath.

Heath’s Cantenna originally sold for $9.95. It was used to test and align radio transmitters. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

The Cantenna started out at $9.95 for a dummy load with pretty good specifications. Less than 1.5:1 VSWR, all the way up to 300 MHz. It was packaged in a 1-gallon paint can, and the instructions said, “Go down to your local power company and talk to the switch yard supervisor. More than likely, they’ll let you draw off one gallon of transformer oil to keep your dummy load capable of running a full kilowatt.” Filled with oil, the Cantenna would run a full kilowatt for four or five minutes.

However, transformer oil had a serious problem. It was loaded with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). Sometime during the 1970s, we changed the recommendation from transformer oil to mineral oil. Heath sold more than a couple of hundred thousand Cantennas over the course of 30 years. The price gradually rose to $24.95. The Cantenna is probably one of Heath’s longer lasting products. I think we finally obsoleted it in 1983. 

In 1964, Heath introduced the Heath SB line, which was a series of radios specifically designed for SSB operation. These radios covered 80 to 10 meters and did not have AM capability. There was the SB-300 receiver, the SB-400 transmitter, and the SB-200 linear amplifier. They closely resembled the Collins S line. In fact, several engineers who worked on Heath’s SB radios came from Collins, which had gone through a series of layoffs because of military contract ups and downs.

One of the key features of Heath’s SB line was the Linear Master Oscillator (LMO). Instead of having a nonlinear VFO, the VFO in the SB radios was linear. The LMO itself covered 5 to 5.5 Megahertz. It was supplied as a pre-built, tested, and calibrated module and could easily tune a frequency to within 200 Hz. The actual transmitting or receiving frequency was then developed by heterodyning the LMO output with various crystal oscillators to get the desired operating frequency. Heath’s SB radios were a very, very popular line.

The SB-300 evolved into the SB-301 receiver, and then again to the SB-303 receiver, which was fully solid state. Everything prior to the SB-303 had been based on vacuum tubes. The transmitter became the SB-401, which included multiple minor improvements such as allowing the user of an SB-301/SB-401 pair to transceive using a single LMO. Transceiver operation was becoming popular.  Later, Heath introduced the SB-220 amplifier with 2KW of output power. More accessories followed.

Heath introduced the SB line of amateur radios in 1964. The radios were intentionally designed to closely resemble similar radios from Collins. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

The SB-200A was introduced in 1978. It lacked the 10-meter band, unless you purchased a separate accessory and signed a statement you were an amateur radio operator and were licensed to use 10 meters. That change was needed because a fair number of Ham radio power amplifiers had been purchased and converted to 11-meter use for CB work (which was illegal) prior to that FCC restriction. So, the stock amplifier was restricted to 80 through 15 meters. The SB-200s outsold all linear amplifiers anywhere. It was extremely popular. One of the characteristics that made a kit linear amplifier or kit power amplifier so popular, no matter how you cut it, was pricing. Amplifier construction is very labor-intensive, so if you built it yourself, you put a lot of the savings into the end product.

In 1970, Heath introduced the SB-220, which was again an 80- through 10-meter amplifier with 2000 watts of output power, peak-to-peak in sideband mode, and 1000 watts of output power on CW or RTTY. The SB-221 trimmed it back to 80 to 15 meters, unless you had the special accessory, which you got only if you could swear to being an amateur radio operator.

Heath expanded the SB line in 1965 to include a transceiver. That product, the SB-100, had a rather interesting history. Originally, the product line plan called for introducing the SB-100 right along with the SB-300 and SB-400. It was an HF transceiver supporting 80- through 10-meter operation. Design complexities caused the initial design to be scrapped, and a new design was required before product introduction. The SB-100 had a lot of design and sub-system commonality with all the SB-series products. Later, the SB-100 became the SB-101 with several minor improvements. The SB-102 was introduced in 1967. It had a solid-state LMO instead of one based on vacuum tubes.

Heath introduced a 6-meter version of the SB-100 in 1965: the SB-110. Because of the LMO, any one band switch setting on the SB lines covered only a 500-kilohertz span. So, for example, if you had one of the SB HF products and you switched to the 10-meter band (the only band that exceeded 500 KHz), you found there were four 10-meter positions on the band switch. With the first 10-meter position, you could tune from 28.0 to 28.5 MHz, the second from 28.5 to 29 MHz, the third 29.0 to 29.9 MHz and the fourth from 29.5 to 30.0 MHz. Likewise, there were four band positions to cover the 6-meter band. So, you covered 50.0 to 50.5 MHz, 50.5 to 51.0 MHz, etc.

An “A” version of the SB-110 appeared in 1969. It was a moderately popular radio, because once amateur radio switched from AM to SSB, a lot of TVI (television interference) problems, almost guaranteed with AM operation on 6 meters, went away. Did you ever wonder where channel 1 on a television set went to? TV channel 1 was assigned to 48 to 54 MHz. The upper 4 MHz became the amateur radio 6-meter band. Channel 2 was the next 6-MHz chunk of spectrum (54 to 60 MHz). TV receivers at the time had wide-open front ends, so when you had the constant carrier of an AM transmission in the vicinity of the TV receiver, you had TVI. That was very much lessened when you went to SSB as there is no constant frequency component to the signal. There still was some TVI, but not as much.

In 1963, Heath introduced the Monobanders, which were very popular products. They were 100-watt SSB only transceivers, introduced at $119.95. One radio covered 80 meters; one covered 40 meters; and one covered 20 meters. The Monobanders were single-band, SSB radios. You could not use AM or CW with them.

One unique feature of the Monobander design was putting the whole transceiver on a single circuit board. I remember talking with the engineer who developed these products. He said, “You don’t know how many people came in and told me you could not build a 100-watt, SSB tube-based transmitter and receiver all on the same circuit board.” He did it anyway. He was typical of many Heath engineers who were told, “You can’t do it for that price,” and they did it anyway. This same engineer, by the way, was responsible for the SB-100 and the SB-101 transceivers.

Heath introduced the single-band SSB Monobander radio line in 1963. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

In 1966, Heath introduced the “A” versions of the Monobanders, dropping the price from $119 to $99, except for the 20-meter version, which cost $104. Monobander “A” versions added selectable upper sideband and lower sideband, a decision I could never quite understand, because operating procedure on the 80- and 40-meter bands used lower sideband, and the 20-meter band used upper sideband. The “A” versions also added a microphone connector. The original Monobanders came with a permanently wired microphone.

During the 1960s, Heath introduced a lineup of “DX” products that were strictly for the novice radio amateur. The DX-35 transmitter graduated to the DX-40 and then later to the DX-60, the DX-60A, and the DX-60B. These radios all used the same style of transmitter, with minor refinements including repackaging. The AR-3 became the HR-10 and then the HR-10B. The VF-1 VFO became the HG-10 and then the HG-10B. Each one of these products had some cabinet refinements, and some operational improvements. The HW-16 was introduced as a novice CW only transceiver, selling for $99.50, which was quite a bargain in 1969.

Throughout the 1960s, Heath produced a series of low-cost DX transmitters for the novice radio amateur. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

Of course, Heath introduced many non-Ham kits during the 1960s, including a color TV with a 21–inch, round CRT that sold for $349.00. You got your choice of cabinets for the TV, starting at $49.00. The TV’s UHF tuner was optional at that stage of the game, which shows that most television broadcast channels were all in the VHF spectrum in the early 1960s. The TV tuners were pre-built. It took innovative engineering just to allow a non-technical person to be able to build and align a color television set at home with no additional test equipment. We had the customer build a dot generator and a convergence setup out of some of the other circuits within the television, which could be switched back and forth between the test mode for alignment and operational modes. This color TV became the first component of a very major Heathkit product line, which became four color TV kits and one black-and-white television by 1969.

And what was I doing? I designed instruments. I designed the EU-805 Universal Digital Instrument, a 12.5-MHz counter/timer with a 0.05 percent precision DMM featuring 1-Gohm input impedance. It was sold fully assembled and tested for $1,350.00, or $1,130 without the DMM. This was part of the Heath/Malmstadt-Enke educational product line, which included instruments designed for chemists, physicists, and other scientists so they could learn how to use electronic instruments.

Do you have your own story about Heathkits in the 1960s? If so, please tell your story in the comment section below. We’d love to hear about your experiences.

Chas Gilmore (W8IAI) has given his full presentation about Heath’s kits and the company’s other contributions to amateur radio to several Ham groups and clubs. If your organization is within a reasonable travel distance from Akron, Ohio and you’re interested in a live presentation, you can contact him at cgilmore@groupgilmore.com.

Chuck Penson (WA7ZZE) self-published a massive, well-illustrated, encyclopedic book titled “Heathkit, A Guide to the Amateur Radio Products” in 2021. Many of the photos in this article series and some details came from Penson’s book. The book is now out of print after three editions. However, Penson is considering another printing. If you are interested in a copy of this book, you can contact Penson at wa7zze@gmail.com.

Terry Perdue (K8TP) was a design engineer at the Heath Company from 1973 to 1991. Among other products, he designed the Heath Intellirotor, a computerized controller used for pointing Ham antennas. In 1992, Perdue self-published a book titled “Heath Nostalgia,” which is now out of print. He also published a CD of photos titled “Heathkit – The Early Years,” which is also out of print. However, Perdue is offering the $15 CD to EEJournal readers. The CD includes JPG page scans of Perdue’s book, “Heath Nostalgia,” and about 900 high-resolution photos of the Heathkit plant, catalogs, fliers, in-house publications, newspaper clippings, selected product photos (mostly vintage Ham products), and a 30-minute audio file of Heath’s first Director of Engineering Gene Fiebich’s memories, which include how he came to join Heath and events he attended, including trade shows, Heath’s Christmas parties and picnics, etc. Contact Perdue at k8tp@comcast.net for more information.

References

Chas Gilmore, “Heathkit and Ham Radio, 2024 Edition,” PowerPoint presentation

Chuck Penson, “Heathkit: A Guide to the Amateur Radio Products,” self published, 2021

Terry Perdue, “Heath Nostalgia,” self published, 1992

Read all five articles in the “H is for Heathkits and Hams” series:

“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 1 – Early Days through the 1950s

“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 2 – The 1960s

“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 3 – The 1970s

“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 4 – The 1980s, 1990s, and the end

“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 5 – Reasons for Heath’s Success in Amateur Radio

EEJournal’s original Heathkit history series:

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 1: Early Days

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 2: The 1960s through the mid-1970s

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 3: The Microcomputer Kit Era

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 4: The Demise of Heathkit

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 5: Final Thoughts

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 6: And Yet More Final Thoughts