The Ramsey Electronics Hobby Kit Group is shutting down
KeithE
Posts: 957
There's an announcement here:
http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/ce.htm
Just heard about this when monitoring the N6NFI 9 AM Talk Net this morning.
http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/ce.htm
Just heard about this when monitoring the N6NFI 9 AM Talk Net this morning.
Comments
Not very many kit makers left anymore. So who's left to teach kids how to solder with real Lead?
Also, Ten-Tec changed hands again. The new owner is supposed to make an announcement soon.
Oddly enough as all the old famous names in kits have disappeared there seems to be a lot of simple educational kits sprouting in China. I bet there are millions of young Chinese kids slinging lead solder as we speak.
Juilian Islett is fond of building them and has many videos about them: https://www.youtube.com/user/julius256/videos
On a whim I bought a cheap and cheerful Chinese robot kit in our local electronics parts store a few months back. They have a rack full of different kits.
Just look at the growth of Sparkfun, Adafruit, all the Arduino world, the Raspberry Pi and many others.
And of course Parallax is that scene as well.
The last one I did was an FM Stereo exciter. Turns out, that one would transmit a couple miles or more with a good antenna. On a whim, I drove an old 70s era car with that nice whip antenna up to a hill and a friend following in my truck. Powered the kit with the car battery and coupled it to the car antenna with a little hand wound coil. The music was supplied with a little media player.
I suppose the metal car and whip made for a pretty good antenna and ground plane, though the insulated tires should have marginalized all of that.
It went for miles! Was able to drive all over the neighborhood listening in my truck while running errands and taking liberal detours for testing purposes, of course.
There's still a market for US-made specialty kits. Paia comes to mind. There are many musicians who enjoy constructing analog components. (Interesting also is that many of the kits were designed back in the 70s and 80s.)
Sparkfun was among the first to respond to the new trends by making breakout boards for interesting surface mount chips. Now, everyone does it, and this has become the new "kit."
I still have a perfectly working Ramsey FM transmitter that I built back in the early 90's. I even splurged and bought the plastic case for it.
Blast from the past! I still have my 2700:
http://www.johnnypumphandle.com/johnny/Paia/paia.htm
(not mine)
PAIA still going strong:
http://www.paia.com/
I talked to John Simonton back in 2004 after the site went back active. I called the company number, and he answered. I told him I was an avid fan and customer, and we talk fore about 45 minutes about all the old products that I had purchase through the years.
Unfortunately, this happened the next year:
http://www.paia.com/obituary.html
After the Second World War people were building radios and TVs from kits. Why? Because there was no place people could get them from at an affordable price.
Back in 1972 or so I built the Wireless World calculator kit.
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/advance_wireless_world.html
Why? Because a digital calculator was unheard of then. Things like the HP calculators were horrendously expensive.
Heck, I even had to design and build my own digital clock with TTL an Nixie tubes.
Then in the late 1970s it was the computer. Many people were building their machines from kits and parts.
Then the whole scene went dead for two decades or more. Apart from the old amatuer radio guys. Bless 'em.
Until recently, with the spurt of Adafruit, Sparkfun, robotics, the Maker Movement, etc, etc.
If those old kit makers could not keep up, that is sad, but the whole scene is good today.
In 1975 as a young technician, I design and built a digital timer for our AutoCross club using TTL and the new,( then) IR sensors, replacing a pneumatic and analog Heuer system. That propelled me to continue on to where I am now. I did it all from scratch, but I built on all the Forest Mims books that I had at the time.
I'm glad those books are still floating around.
Those books were not so academic and mathematical, they inspired millions of young guys to do something.
I think there's still two good reasons to build a kit.
The first is a good kit presents the assembly as a learning experience about the components and theory of operation. Ideally having you tests subsystems during the process so you'll know how to fix or extend the function of the item.
The second is the IKEA effect in which consumers place a higher value on products they partially create. You see this happen with boat kits and IKEA furniture. But if people like it, then why not?
That's Forrest Mims. (Two R's, two M's.)
Sure, there's always a good reason for building kits. Whether or not the oldskool kits are relevant today, is another matter. Building stuff is still alive and well, but the board-and-component level kits are suffering from the strong disincentive of costing more than a ready-made product.
Someone mentioned the plethora (as in pinatas) of kits in China. They're all the rage there, but from what I've seen, most are just the parts with little or no educational element. What made the products like Heathkit so useful is the time they spent creating a curriculum. Ask Ken how much it costs to develop and maintain learning materials to support a range of products. He spent so much he can't even afford a razor these days!
This art is not dead though. It might even be doing better than ever. Look at the massive success of Adafruit.
I was quite surprised that such a kit was available in 2015, that it undertook so much, and that it cost so little.
I haven't thought of him in a long time. I remember buying a couple of books he wrote for RS on transistor circuits during the 70s and spent hundreds of hours reading them and going through them.