Customer Reviews

Inventor's Handbook: Radio and Communications

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

I would strongly advise against buying this product! I bought this kit with my birthday money. This set includes materials and instructions to build a radio.. I made one small mistake in the first step and it wont work. The kit requires to you wind some very fine wire around a cardboard tube without kinking the wire. I couldnt do it, and my Dad couldnt do it. On a scale of one to ten (ten being the best), Id give it a zero.

Garret (age 10)

This kit looked like a useful introduction to electronics for my 7-year-old son, assuming that I did at least some of the radio assembly. Winding the coil took over an hour and assembly of the other components took another 2 hours. I did all of it, it was way beyond his ability. It should not have taken that long but the supplied terminal block uses screws that do not always engage the thin wires and the thin wires are prone to breaking. The legs of the transistors were barely long enough to make it to the designated segments on the transistor that requires crossing of legs. Also, when crosing the legs of that transistor, the instructions say to remove some insulation from the bundle of extra wire included and place it on the legs of the transistor to avoid a short while crossing the legs, but I couldn't get that insulation onto the leg of the transistor and had to take some insulation from another piece of larger wire that I already had. By the time I worked out the loose connections and checked for shorts, I had spent way too much time on this project only to find that it did not work. Bummer!

The net effect was that my son had been exposed to the idea of electronics but did not enjoy the satisfaction of listening to the radio. I always wonder if the people who design these bad kits actually try to put the kit together or if they simply throw some parts together with some hyped up claims on the cover. How much would it have cost the manufacturer to supply thicker grade wiring, a pre-wound coil, and a better terminal block? You are talking pennies in extra expense. After putting together such a good book and attractive packaging, the publisher blew it by including cheap components.

My daughter and I have worked through about a dozen science kits of various types--this is the absolute worst. I have never seen anything like it. The parts are extremely poorly designed for the task and of very poor quality. We through this kit out after an hour. We will search elsewhere for a different radio kit.

I've had previous horrendous experience with various electronics kits sold by Dowling Magnets that were poorly written and impossible to put together. Compared to those, this kit is very well written, with good pictures and diagrams. The previous reviewer had a problem with the first step: winding the coil. The instructions recommend getting an adult to help out with this step and I agree - kids don't have the manual dexterity to wind up the coil. It took me a good 30 minutes and I had my son's help, but that was much easier than the previous kit I'd had, where I had to spend an hour creating a winder, a half hour winding, and then the coil didn't work. This was comparatively simple and straight forward.

For the rest of the kit, my 11-year old did everything. He was very proud of his work, though it didn't work at first and I had to do some trouble shooting. One problem was that the last couple of wires installed were so thin that the connection mechanism wouldn't work well and I ended up soldering them down.

Before starting the kit I had my son learn the basic parts and what they do - he actually liked that. There is a colorful sheet which has a picture of each part and an explanation. Capaciters, diodes, transistors, etc.

All in all, my son was really excited about building this radio. It does, however, take some adult help, so be prepared.