My First Heathkit

In the winter of 1968, I was taking a French class in 9th grade and wanted to tune in to some foreign shortwave stations to listen to real French being spoken. I ordered the cheapest Heathkit shortwave receiver, the model GR-81, that they had for $24. I put it together and got it working and was amazed and dissapointed at the same time. I had never used a regenerative receiver before and discovered that they made lousy shortwave receivers for AM broadcast signals but made excellent ham band receivers. Suddenly, I could understand the single sideband phone signals on the ham bands and could hear CW (international morse code) as tones rather than thumps. I quickly taught myself the Morse code, got my ham license, forgot all about French and the rest is history. I owned a number of used Heathkit ham receivers and transmitters but only built three Heathkits in my life - the GR-81, an HW-8 portable CW transceiver and the IG-5218 audio generator. I actually still have and use the audio generator that I built in the early 80s.