Star Roamer

[CeaSaR]

You are quite welcome CKD. Always glad to help.

And thank you again to Dean for stepping up to the plate. Great work.
BTW, I'd love to see your letter to Marc Ellis. It's these little sidenotes
to print history that so few ever get to see.

CeaSaR

[Dean Huster]

I was glad to be able to help everyone here. Now that I have all my Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics (and their successors) out and sorted, I can access and scan articles for you guys as needed and would be glad to. I'd like to scan all the mags for instant access (and sharing on CD), but scanning takes a long time.

Here's that letter you were interested in, CeaSar. It'll differ slightly from what I sent ckd.

Letter is corrected from the original for most typos. Items in [brackets] are additions I've installed here for a 14-year-later update.



July 15, 1996

Marc Ellis
Popular Electronics
500 Bi-County Blvd.
Farmingdale NY 11735

Dear Marc,

I need to take exception with your statement that the Knight-Kit Star Roamer "was the top of the line of Knight shortwave receiver kits." As a teenager totally enveloped with electronics in the 1960s, I spent many an evening pouring through catalogs from Edmund Scientific, Lafayette, Applebee [actually, it was Burstein-Applebee of Kansas City] and Allied Radio. I dreamed of the day that I could purchase Knight-Kits, because each kit was much more affordable than its Heathkit counterpart. My first kit was the KG-620 VTVM. I followed that with the [KG-670] RC Tester and [then their 20K ohm/volt] VOM, then spent every day of the summer of 1966 on a tractor, cultivating soybeans [pre-emergents have eliminated that gas-wasting chore these days] while dreaming about the money I was going to make and spend on a Knight-Kit shortwave receiver.

At the time, Knight-Kit made three decent receivers: the middle of the line Star Roamer, the R-55A and the R-100A. (You may have been confused by the advertising which may have emphasized the R-55A and R-100A as ham band receivers. I assure you that they were general coverage receivers with ham-band-only bandspread dials.) One of my friends owned a Star Roamer and I knew that it wouldn't do what I wanted, although it did have a long-wave band. Another friend had the R-55A. Nice, but still had some missing features (although it did tune the 6-meter ham band). But the R-100A was the top of the line Knight-Kit general-coverage receiver and sold for $99.95 plus tax and shipping. You could add the optional S-meter, crystal calibrator and [S-8A] speaker. [I did that.] As I recall from over 30 years ago, the additions where $9.95, $19.95 and $9.95 respectively. The R-55A had the companion T-50 transmitter and the R-100A had the T-150 as its companion. Want to talk about features for the money? The T-150 used a pair of 6146s in the final, performed on 80 - 6 meters using CW or AM, had crystal control of built-in VFO and as I recall, sold for $149.95! I stall have that R-100A (and T-150, too) and have yet to replace it with a more modern receiver. [In 2010, I'm now using an older Kenwood synthesized HF receiver.] Over that 30-year period, I never did anything other than replace the RF gain control, run the receiver though a top-notch alignment and fix the AVC line after I unknowingly pinched it under the RF deck.

A few short years after that, Allied began downsizing the Knight-Kit line, and replaced [their line] of receivers with less desirable boxes. I was more saddened when Allied got out of the kit business than when Heath got out over twenty years later.

By the way, the R-100A used a 6X4 rectifier rather than a selenium stack, so I'm not sure you can necessarily make the assumption that a set with a vacuum tube rectifier is older. Those selenium rectifiers have been around a lo-o-o-ong time.

I think my brother-in-law still has the Star Roamer he built from a kit, so if you need any weird information, he may still have the docs ... or if you need me to take a look in some specific area on the twin of your restoration, that can be arranged.

Great work, Marc! I really enjoy your column, even though you made me feel really bad a couple of years ago. You see, back around 1982, I finally got rid of my Echophone Commercial [another of Marc's restoration project articles] just because an errant drill bit went through the BFO coil when, as a kid in 1963, I was trying to install a 1/4" headphone jack.

Sincerely yours,

Dean Huster
POB 720847
Oklahoma City OK 73172-0847