Classic Heathkit OL-1 Scope Gets Some TLC

These days, not only are oscilloscopes very common, but even a cheap instrument today would have been the envy of the world’s greatest labs not that long ago. But back in the day, the home ex…

Heathkit Signal Generator Gets An Update

[DTSS_Smudge] correctly intuits that if you are interested in an old Heathkit signal generator, you probably already know how to solder. So, in a recent video, he focused on the components he decid…

Steel Reinforcement Toughens Cracked Vintage Knobs

Nothing can ruin a restoration project faster than broken knobs. Sure, that old “boat anchor” ham rig will work just fine with some modern knobs, but few and far between are the vintage…

Voice Control For A Vintage Heathkit Radio

Most modern ham rigs have a voice activated transmission (VOX) mode, although we don’t know many people who use it often. When a transmitter is in VOX mode, it starts transmitting when you ta…

A Dusty Boat Anchor Back From The Brink

Many of us will have found dusty forgotten pieces of electronics and nursed them back to health, but we were captivated by [Don]’s tale of electronic revival. Instead of perhaps a forgotten c…

Magnetic Bubble Memory Brought To Life On Heathkit

There are all kinds of technology that appear through the ages that find immediate success, promise to revolutionize the world, but fade to obscurity almost as quickly. Things like the ZIP disk, RD…

Retro Gadgets: Make Your Scope Dual Channel

We live in a time when having an oscilloscope is only a minor luxury. But for many decades, a good scope was a major expense, and almost no hobbyist had a brand new one unless it was of very poor q…

A PDP 11 By Any Other Name: Heathkit H11 Teardown And Repair

[Lee Adamson] is no stranger to classic computers. He recently picked up a Heathkit H11A which, as you might remember, is actually a PDP-11 from DEC. Well, technically, it is an LSI-11 but still. L…

Heathkit IM-13 VTVM Repair

If you are under a certain age, you might not know the initialism VTVM. It stands for vacuum tube voltmeter. At first glance, you might just think that was shorthand for “old voltmeter”…

VCF East 2021: Preserving Heathkit’s 8-Bit Computers

To say the Heathkit name is well known among Hackaday readers would be something of an understatement. Their legendary kits launched an untold number of electronics hobbies, and ultimately, plenty …