I was doing a little reminiscing today and remembering a little three tube Knight Kit broadcast transmitter that I built back in the early 1960s when I was in high school. It didn't take a lot of browsing to find your site. Thanks.

I built numerous Knight Kits over my high school years, but the Broadcaster was my first. I'll never forget the first time I actually broadcasted something to our radio with it. I even remember the first tune. I sang "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey" thru a little crystal mike that I had. I remember my mother getting somewhat upset because she went by the nickname "Bill".

That first experience led to my outlaw radio station, KYHM, (Kan You Hear Me). I set it up in my bedroom with a turntable and microphone. I had a long antenna outside which was of course very illegal. I vividly remember the fun I had with it. It was both a learning experience and a way for me to play tricks on my friends.

I read on your website that you had acquired two of these broadcasters. Do you find them often or are they extremely hard to come across. I would love to have one for old-times sake. You published a schematic. Do you also have a parts list. It shouldn't be hard to find the parts and build a replica if I can't find an original.

Thanks for your website and your help. I'm now 59 years old and do a lot of reminiscing.

John Bailey

Talk about bringing back memories as a kid in Chicago. I grew up on Knight Kits. I remember my first one was a small crystal radio. I eventually moved into the clock radio, mono and stereo amps, tuners, tape recorder,test equipment and even an oscilloscope. I also built a couple of ham receivers but no transmitters.I would spend hours looking the catalog over and over looking for that new challenge to build and own. When I was a kid I used to live in that store on Western Ave.

I grew up in Schiller Park and my dad owned a manufacturing company on Grand & Wood Str which was just East of Western. On Saturdays I'ld drive in with him or take the bus. I'ld walk that store for hours.I remember buying parts required patience because they were slow, but it was worth the wait. My dad bought me my first kit. From my first kit to last I enjoyed building and regretfully troubleshooting. Not everything worked the first time. I remember building a kit which when turned on for the first time just let out lots of smoke. Obvious there was something wrong. But who cared. That's how I learned about the electronics.

I remember when Allied moved from tube to transistor stereos. The units got a lot more powerful but smaller. But eventually brought the end. With foreign competition able to make complete assembled units for the same or less money, the end of the kit was inevitable.

I even built some Heathkit kits, even a TV. It wasn't the same though. I think those years building kits gave me love for fine stereo equipment today and a good understanding of electronic circuits. Even though my background is mechanical engineering, I can still pick up a schematic and understand how things work. I owe that to my Knight Kits.

And yes I remember the Olsen store across the street. I worked in one in Northlake Plaza. Certainly though not in the same caliber as Allied Radio.

Thank you for the memories and hope you find more people who grew up on Knight Kits.

Larry Zanotti South Carolina

My best friend in elementary school bought a Knight Kit AM broadcaster. Man we wore that thing out playing with it!

The Knight Kit had a profound affect on our lives. My buddy is now a Patent Agent with the US Patent Office.

I went to engineering school and graduated with an EE Degree in 1978. My love for circuits has recently culminated in the development of a single chip CMOS satellite receiver:

http://www.silabs.com/products/wireless/si2210.asp

Who would have guessed that the Knight Kit would have brought us this far!

73's Charlie Thompson W5CDT Austin, TX

A big Howdy to you from Utah! Just today (Oct 16, 2004) I received a Knight Radio Broadcaster and Amp as a gift from an old high school buddy in Michigan. I had originally built one way back in the early 60's as I recall. I don't remember what ever happened to that old unit but it sure gave us lots of fun.

Our radio days lasted most of a year. We were "On-The-Air" every night from 7 to 10 PM. We had the "Nifty Fifty," the top fifty records. I only made about 50 cents an hour working in a grocery store, so most of that money went into buying our nifty fifty records.

Our setup included two three speed turntables, a homemade mixer, microphone, a tape recorder and of course the Knight Broadcaster. Our antenna may have exceeded the limits by a bit. Dad owned a piece of land that was about four city blocks long but only 175 feet wide. Our home was at one end of the land with a large two car garage out back. Our radio station took up one half of that garage. Our antenna ran about half the length of that land, about 900 hundred feet, a simple long wire, strung about 30 feet over the ground. Our tests showed us getting pretty good coverage out to about 10 miles. As kids, we didn't know any better and thought them rules about antenna length didn't pertain to us.

Our shows were the latest "Nifty Fifty records," news from last nights newspaper and assorted comedy skits we recorded on tape for playback on the air. One recurring skit featured "Chef Nogood," a comedy cooking show.

A few years later, after a stint in the U. S. Army, I took the test and became a full fledged ham radio operator and still am to this day, legal now, operating as K8BR, Extra Class.

I recently purchased a small solid state AM broadcast kit. Very nice but it hardly covers the whole house. I plan to put this old Knight in operation to broadcast old time radio shows to my collection of antique radios. I've got quite a collection of old time 1930's and 40's radio shows and stack them in a fancy CD player which drives a fancy mixer and thus into the old Knight Broadcaster.

I love the glow of them old radio's in a darkened room at night listening to old mystery shows or Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Edgar Bergen & Charley McCarthy and Abbott & Costello. Yes, I'm old enough that I heard those shows on radio so long ago, when TV was still many years away. I can close my eyes and see all those characters looking just like I wanted them to look. I can still use my imagination with the help of this old Knight Broadcaster to "see" the Lone Ranger as he rides yet again.

As for other Knight Kits, I had an Ocean Hopper, a Span Master, a R-100 receiver, Volt/Ohm meters and now proudly own a Star Roamer that my Dad built many years ago. I recently "tweaked" the coils on the Star Roamer to peak it up and made one change. When my dad built the radio he went the wrong way around the tuning shaft with the dial cord, so that when you turned the main tuning right the dial went left. I simply reversed the dial cord so now the dial goes right when you turn the knob right. Still, it's a neat little collectors radio.

Thanks for putting the comments of other Knight users on the web site. I'm adding those to my notes to be saved along with the schematic you have. Many thanks for your efforts!

Brian Ripley Ogden, Utah

Hi Jim. This is a great site, and I will be anxiously looking forward to seeing more stories about various Knight-Kit projects. I have some goodies to share, too, so be looking for them in the near future.

My phono oscillator was the enclosed type, and I cannot even remember when they had an open chassis style. The closed chassis was dangerous enough because the line cord plug was NOT the keyed type that became the standard later, and the AC/DC design meant that you could actually plug it in backwards and have the full 110V on the case! The paint helped a bit, but there were plenty of bare spots sticking out ( including the transformer core ) that would give you a real wallop if you had things hooked up just wrong! ( more about that in a minute )

I had a very good friend in my pre-teen years, and we lived about 2 miles from one another. We decided that we were each going to build one of these things, and use them to talk to each other in a quazi amateur radio mode.

I figured out how to turn off the oscillator portion of the little box by switching the cathode of the 50C5 off of ground. Thus, we both could tune to the same frequency and take turns transmitting and receiving. ( see, I told you it was a lot like an amateur radio setup! )

We used standard broadcast band radios to listen for each other, but like many radios of that era, these had external antenna connections as well as the loop on the back of the set. So even though we were some distance apart, it was quite easy to hear each other, thanks to many many feet worth of extra wire running out to some trees in the back yards!

Another one of the "improvements" I made to the broadcaster was to feed audio back through the transformer to modulate the thing. I am not certain, without looking more into the schematic ( it HAS been years ! ) what that accomplished from an electronic point of view, but I will tell you that the audio was much better when it came from that external hi-fi amplifier than the audio that was generated by the little two tube modulator that was built into the rig! BTW, which hi-fi amplifier do you think I used? If you guessed the 12 watt mono amp ( I forget the model number, but it was a Knight-Kit naturally! ) you are absolutely correct ! The amp had a black rectangular chassis, and a gray perforated cage. I have a story about that, too, but I will also save that one for later!

No, I have not forgotten about the AC/DC chassis. Both of us lived in houses with steam heat radiators. These things were hooked into a sort of grounding system and sat promenently under the windows in each room of our houses. I will never forget one of the storys that my buddy told me about leaning across his little transmitter and grabbing hold of the radiator for whatever reason. ( probably checking to see if the heat was "on" in his room ! ) Well to use his words, which I will never forget, " I grabbed hold of that radiator, and BOY did I ever get a SHOCK! "

I have always wondered to this day if Knight was ever sued for manufacturing and distributing such a dangerous device! Of course, now days, we are much more litigious than we were back then. Probably good for Allied Radio!

Well, I have gone on to a career in Electronics that is over 35 years long, now, and I can thank Allied Radio and their Knight-Kits for pointing me in the direction that I eventually traveled !

Best to you! Jim Stanicek

Hi again, Jim

I wrote up another little story about my adventure with the C-100 Walkie Talkie. I will be telling you some stories about other kits I assembled at about my Jr. High School days. My first "real" HiFi system was built from a KnightKit 12 watt basic amplifier, plus some heathkit stuff. I'm trying to find the info on that amp. It was a real sweetheart, and a friend of mine just picked one up in mint condition off of EBay. It is as nice as I remember it being!

Well anyway, here is the Walkie Talkie story. You may use it as you please:

I can remember the C-100 Walkie-Talkie quite well. It was one of the first kits I believe I ever built. The time was back in the earlier days of CB radio, ( I was probably about the age depicted by the boy in the catalog illustration ) and radio in general was a brand-new and exciting adventure to me.

It took me a long time to save up the $17.76 , plus the Shipping and Handling that two of those little rigs cost, and it was a glorious day when I sent my order off to 100 N. Western in Chicago.

Several days later, the boxes arrived, and I anxiously tore into the packages to pull out all the parts to put them together.

One thing that surprised me a bit about the little Walkie-Talkies was how small they were! I guess I wasn't expecting them to be the size of a military WWII outfit, but the picture led me to believe that they would be a bit bigger than they actually were! When I look at the illustration on the website, I still think they should have been a bit heftier than they actually were!

Another thing that kind of amazed me was that the regenerative rush from the receivers was almost as easy to hear on the sets as the output from the transmitter!

None of this was a detriment to my actual enjoyment of the little rigs, however, because they actually did work the first time I hooked batteries up to them, and I could talk to my buddy up to a couple of blocks away using the little outfits!

My biggest thrill came when a real, honest-to-goodness CBer with a real base station actually came back to me and talked with me for a few minutes! He asked me what I was using, and when I told him I had put the radio together with my own hands, he seemed genuinely impressed! The rush of the super-regen receiver is probably what drew him to the channel I was on!

Well, my buddy and I had a great time with the little rigs, but eventually, other things came along to occupy our time. I never did stray very far away from ham radio, however, thanks to friends whos Dads were hams, a ham radio station in our High School, etc.

I can thank the C-100, though, for giving me one of the first experiences I had of actually being "on the air" !

Best Wishes, Jim Stanicek AG3Y

Here is another of my adventures as a youth, building Knight-Kits. You will see that this story has a bit of a twist to it.

By the time I got to High School, I was getting a reputation of being "that kid that can build and fix kits, pretty good! "

Part of our Technical Training classes consisted of putting together projects which either consisted of a collection of parts and a schematic from one of the popular electronics books of the day ( Science and Electronics, Popular Electronics, etc. ) or a kit from Heath, or Allied Radio.

Well, one of the guys in the class had purchased a Knight-Kit SpanMaster ( see the following URL ( http://www.dxing.com/rx/span.htm ) a really nifty looking 2 tube super-regenerative broadcast-shortwave radio.

The only problem is that he couldn't get it to receive a single thing. Not even a local broadcast station! After fiddling around with it for days, he finally gave up in disgust and asked me if I could take a look at it.

I received the shock ( not electrical, fortunately ) of my life when I opened up the cover and saw that he had wired the entire radio without ever cutting a single component lead shorter than full length! Can you imagine what a radio looks like that has all kinds of resistors and capacitors sticking out on the ends of 3 inches of wire? Not only was it no wonder it didn't receive anything, but it is very amazing that it didn't short out completely !

Well, the first thing I did was to "re-kit" the entire radio, which is to say that I unsoldered all the components from the terminal strips, etc. and put them back into cupcake trays. I then proceeded to re-build the radio, paying close heed to the instructions, "cut the leads on a .01 mfd capacitor to 3/4 inch , and attach one lead. . . . " etc.

Happily, the radio worked perfectly after I re-built the thing, and the fellow was very happy that his money had not gone to complete waste. He did not get a good grade for his project, but he did get a radio out of the deal, and I got even more of a reputation for being "that kid that can build and fix kits, pretty good! " If I remember correctly, I also got extra credit from the Electronics Shop teacher for a job well done!

Sincerely, Jim Stanicek