Part 3 of this article series covers a period of sustained growth for the Heath Company. The company’s amateur radio equipment kits continued to sell well, but by the end of the 1970s, its most advanced radio kits were already becoming too difficult to build for less advanced kit builders. Meanwhile, the company’s early microcomputer kits quickly started to dominate Heath’s product portfolio.

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: The 1970s brought diversification to Heath’s product lines as found in the 1970 catalog. Heath added weather instruments, clocks, and a new line of educational products and their accompanying courseware to the existing instrumentation, amateur radio, audio, and TV kits. Heath also added an extensive line of general products, which included radio control for model aircraft, Citizen’s Band (CB) radios, photography support products, and many other small support lines. During one year in the 1970s, we added 300 new products to the Heathkit product line.

There were 44 amateur radio products in the 1970 catalog. We expanded the SB line with receiver/transmitters – transceivers – plus a couple of linear amplifiers, a 6-meter transceiver, and a 2-meter transverter, which took a 10-meter signal and converted it to 2 meters for both transmit and receive. We added a series of station accessories as well, including oscilloscope monitors for both the transmitter (with a green CRT) and a panoramic adapter for the receiver (with a yellow CRT), as shown below. There was also a station clock and numerous keyers and other accessories.

The Heathkit SB amateur radio line in the 1970s added oscilloscope monitors, a station clock, and keyers. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

Heath had a very active amateur radio club. There were over 40 of us in the club during the late 1960s and early 1970s. More than 25 percent of Heath’s 1500 employees were Hams. Amateur radio was very popular. The company issued QSL cards to anyone at Heath who was a Ham. Here’s the QSL card I got from Heath. It’s one of many.

Chas Gilmore’s Heath-issued QSL card. Image credit: Chas Gilmore

During the 1968 Field Day, Heath allowed us to use one of the Heathkit trucks to bring all our equipment out to a remote area called Mud Lake, Michigan. There we ran the Mud Lake Michigan UFO Sighting, Atomic-Powered Field Day Society. We set up four or five HF, SSB, and CW stations, and a couple of VHF AM and CW stations. There were some very good CW operators in our group.

Steve Leibson: Hmm! I don’t remember Heath making a nuclear battery, so…

Chas Gilmore: No, the Field Day Society was named after the DC Cook Nuclear Power Plant, which was being built right next to St. Joe, Michigan. Prior to the time I got to Heath, there had been some UFO sightings in the area, so the club’s name just kept growing.

In the early 1970s, FM took hold in amateur radio. Heath was a little bit late in getting into FM, but finally the product manager was sold. He was a big HF guy, but he became sold on the idea that maybe Heath should offer a 2-meter FM rig. In the spring of 1973, we introduced the HW-202, which was a crystal controlled, 6-channel, FM, 10-watt transceiver with an optional tone-burst decoder. A lot of people were using tone encoding for repeater access. We had a 40-watt amplifier to go with the FM transceiver, a 120-volt power supply, and a VHF wattmeter.

Heath expanded the second generation of FM products to include in the HW-2026 synthesized transceiver, introduced for Christmas of 1975. It was also a 10-watt radio with a built-in tone decoder. Frequency selection was made by a set of thumb-wheel switches. Within a few months of its introduction, it became clear that the synthesizer in the HW-2026 had far too many spurs. When its transmitter was keyed, the rig would key up several repeaters in the area. Heath issued a recall for the HW-2026 kit, and that was one of the very first, if not the only, major recall ever done for a Heathkit product. The HW-2026 was replaced by the HW-2036 in 1976. The HW-2036A with expanded 2-meter coverage followed in 1978.

In 1975, Heath introduced a handheld transceiver, the HW-2021, a 1-watt, 5-channel, crystal-controlled rig with an auto patch encoder built in. The HW-2021 was a tough kit to build. There are a lot of components in a handheld radio, and it was a very, very tight fit. This was prior to the availability of surface mount components.

The HW-2021 handheld radio – a 1-watt, 5-meter transceiver – had an integrated auto-patch encoder for use with repeaters. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

Steve Leibson: So, I see a matrix keyboard on the HW-2021, a membrane keyboard, which implies there’s digital circuitry in that one.

Chas Gilmore: No, all it did was generate DTMF (Dual Tone, Multi Frequency) tones. Most of the FM radio communications were done through repeaters. With a 2-meter repeater, you transmit with a 600-Kilohertz offset from your receive frequency. At some remote location, usually situated on a high spot, there is a receiver that picks up your transmitted signal and repeats the signal with a powerful transmitter at the same location. That transmitter’s output is offset by 600 Kilohertz. A radio repeater substantially extends the range of a lower-power VHF radio. Many repeaters also connected to a telephone line so that you could access the telephone line and dial a telephone number using a keypad on your rig.

Steve Leibson: We’re talking, maybe a touchtone encoder. That’s a…

Chas Gilmore: A touchtone, encoder, right. Formal name is DTMF.

Steve Leibson: Okay.

Chas Gilmore: Now, the frequency synthesizer in the HW-2036 was effectively a digitally controlled synthesizer. 

Heath’s next major product introductions were fully solid-state radios. The SB-104 was a solid-state transceiver. Everything was solid-state throughout including the 100-watt power amplifier, which matched the power of its vacuum-tube predecessors. Heath never made a hybrid tube/transistor radio, where the radio is all solid-state except for the final output amplifier. Heath introduced the $699.95 SB-104 for Christmas, 1974. It was an 80-meter through 10-meter rig. Now, that radio was heavily digital, with a digital synthesizer as well as a digital frequency display and some digital control circuitry. The SB-104 turned out to be fairly difficult to build. Although people built quite a few of them, they did have a fair number of difficulties with the kit because of the complexity and the number of parts.

Heath announced the fully transistorized $699.95 SB-104 transceiver kit, covering 80 through 10 meters, for Christmas, 1974. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

Interestingly, there was a great deal of discussion at that time as to whether we’d use up/down switches for frequency tuning or incorporate a traditional rotary control for frequency selection. It was a serious question because rotary frequency control is what everybody had been using with all the preceding series of radios, both ours and the competition. We finally decided that, no, Hams really weren’t ready to change from a rotary frequency selection to a simple up/down counter.

Heath also introduced a remote VFO, so you could operate with split transmit and receive frequencies. The companion SB-230 was a conduction-cooled, one-kilowatt linear amplifier with a large metal power tube coupled to a large heat sink on the back of the amplifier.

As the 1970s started to close, a revolution swept Heath in the form of microcomputer kits. That’s a topic covered in Part 4 in this article series.

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