My comment: Good post with good points about the under-appreciated differences between true homebrew and kit building. I have a lot of Heathkits around me, but I never considered them to be homebrew. There is a big difference. We have been promoting and supporting the HOMEBREW construction of 40 meter direct-conversion receivers. No one would confuse these receivers with commercial, or even kit-built gear. But they work very well, and the builder earns the satisfaction that comes with building something from scratch. There are no factory made PC boards to “populate.” All four of our boards are made using Manhattan construction techniques (super glue, isolation pads, copper-clad substrate). Almost 90 receivers have been completed, in more than 15 countries. Check out the receivers. Build one if you dare:
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search/label/DC%20RX%20Hall%20of%20Fame
BTW — I own a Dymo machine, and my SSB transceivers are in wooden boxes made from junked packing material. 73 Bill N2CQR
Hint of the next SolderSmoke Challenge?? Build your Soldersmoke DCR on P-Box with the Spring Clips?
ReplyDeleteNope! A kit is not the same as homebrew. But neither is scratch-building from a set of directions the same as what you do, coming up with a new design around some part in your bin or just thin air. Are both of those homebrewing? I don't know. Also, neither is assembling screwdriver only kit the same as assembling one where all the parts must be soldered in place.
ReplyDeleteAnd I say this having not designed a rig myself, with a Hendricks Kit Bitx that receives but that I never did get transmitting (had it many years now) and a µBitx that works but of course was a screwdriver only kit.
But what if you start with a kit and modify it? What if you keep modifying it until nothing of the original remains? What if those modifications are your own designs? What if you copied them off the internet?
What if you take all those discarded pieces and re-assemble the original kit?
Ok I'm done now.
I am glad there are so many ways and options to build!
A lot of this has to do with the old ham radio definition of "homebrew." If you took a schematic, gathered the parts, and BUILT the thing in the schematic, that was a homebrew rig. It was NOT a commercial product. Recently, some guys have been saying that unless you have DESIGNED the device yourself, you didn't really homebrew it. I think this reflects 1) a misunderstanding of how rigs are designed (Did YOU design that Colpitts oscillator? Was it you who came up with the common emitter amplifier? Did you create the superhet archtecture?) and 2) a misunderstanding of what hams have long meant by "homebrew." When Jean Shepherd built his Heising modulator, he was almost certainly working from a QST circuit. Was his creation homebrew? Yes, of course it was. When his neighbor Johnny Anderson built that very early TV receiver he was working off info in an electronics magazine. Was his TV homebrew. Of course it was. When the 90 or so guys BUILT in their HOMES the direct conversion receivers that Dean and I posted about, were these receivers homebrew? Of course they are. 73 Bill
ReplyDeleteBuilding from a kit was great when I was 12,
ReplyDeletebut I was home-brewing before that, and the very idea of it today seems as appealing as a paint-by-numbers kit. However, all art, music, culture, etc. is derivative, isn't it? Building from scratch is awesome, making your own design, or borrowing someone else's, or both, who cares? I'm making this DCR!
Robert: I like the paint-by-numbers analogy. Good luck with the DCR. You will have a lot of fun. 73 Bill
ReplyDeleteWhile it's cobbled together from modified kits, TouCans, suspended in its dipole beneath a Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory rain shield, will always sit in my heart as a manifestation of "the simplest harmony between machine and ideas" :)
ReplyDeleteI also wonder if there should be a catetory known as a homebrew system. Sure, TouCans has kits, but they're modded to fit the application. They're also powered and controlled by a homebrew Darlington array buffered momentary contact relay (keyer) and a latching relay (power), that sit on their own breadboard. The signals for that are in turn supplied by a Pico-W which has modified keyer code that was originally intended to drive an LED along with a microPython web server running WebSocket. The power for everything is provided by an Imuto 100 Watt capable, (we use far less power of course), power brick with its voltage dialed to 15 Volts (yet another mod two the RockMite and Tuna Topper) by a Adafruit USB-C power negotiation and delilvery board.
The rig is controlled by a smart phone app cobbled together by handing ChatGPT the original Python control code and asking for a translation to JavaScript.
Then! Throw in the future plan of modding the RockMites keyer to hold the key down while keying the frequency shift control for RTTY, and you've got yet another 'feature'. That feature's already been simmed in JavaScript once again using ChatGPT to provide the scaffolding.
Maybe all of that makes it a homebrew system? It's made it fun at any rate :)