ElencoFM Radio Kit | Elenco Soldering Iron Holder

I felt like a god conjuring a radio signal out of a pile of parts. Assembly is suitable for a beginner like me - just be careful soldering around the battery holder so you don't melt the plastic. Picks up a lot of stations, and while the sound quality isn't amazing, its perfectly suitable for an old-school transistor radio like this, and it gets surprisingly loud.Love it!

Bought two and only got one to work. Thraces come up super easily, so I started using small amounts of flux with each joint.Other than the board quality being on the low side, this is a decent product.

Generally easy to learn with this product. I bought this to try to teach my son about electronics, and soldering. Great skill to be able to repair your household electronics when they break. He got the hang of it pretty quickly. Instructions were easy to follow. However I did find a few locations on the PCB when the trace and through hole pad just seemed to melt away. Seriously we kept the soldering iron temp only high enough to melt the solder but not nearly at max temp. And some of the spots just burned away within 3-4 seconds. I had to make jumpers in a few spots to continue the circuit. Guess it was a learning experience for him as well. Sometimes your repair isn’t straightforward and you need to be able to trace a PCB to see where the component leads so you can complete the repair. Anyway we ended up with a working radio as expected. He learned how to solder, as well as got some real world experience in dealing with cheaper components. That’s not a dig at the company- these are made to be learning kits and need to be cheap, so I don’t hold it against them. And he only got burned once lol. Anyone who uses a soldering iron regularly, knows you’re going to get burned, hopefully he learned not to do what he did again. So if you have zero experience this kit may not be easy for you. I had to supply my own flux to get the included solder to flow properly. Since they provided none I tried to solder without it at first and I couldn’t get simple components to bond, so used my own flux and everything worked fine. Again if you lack experience regarding soldering this may not be something you’d know or have. So yes it’s good for learning on mainly because it’s so cheap. But if you have zero experience and no one around who does it might take quite a bit to get the hang of it and finish the kit properly.

I'm 28 with a fair amount of radio and electronics experience, though I hadn't soldered much in a while. I tried this kit for fun and to reacquaint myself with soldering before working on a more delicate project I have in mind. I found this kit to be very well-designed and easy to assemble. For the price, it is excellent. I had to detract one star because my kit included the incorrect screw for attaching the battery holder (not a big deal, but still annoying) and because I think there are other Elenco radio kits I'd recommend above this one.This kit would be great for a teenager's introduction to soldering (easy to follow assembly instructions, clearly labeled components and PCB, large soldering pads, a fun end-goal of producing your own radio), but probably just "okay" as an educational tool in teaching radio design to a young engineer. I understood the circuit descriptions and educational aspects found in the instruction manual, but I'm already familiar with those concepts. I think it'd be difficult to understand a lot of the provided circuit description and radio theory if I wasn't already familiar with the information. Another thing limiting this kit as an educational tool in radio fundamentals is the inclusion of an integrated circuit in the core of the receiver design. This makes everything more abstract from an educational perspective.I just checked around on Amazon, and there are several other Elenco radio kits available. Some of those are specifically "transistor" versions which involve no integrated circuits. That may mean twice as many components for you to solder, but it'd probably make for a better educational tool in teaching radio fundamentals.Two final tips:The kit features large soldering pads and lead-free solder. I support both of these choices for a beginner's kit (lots of space for your soldering iron, and no lead around children), but that combination can actually make soldering tricky because large pads sink more heat, and lead-free solder doesn't melt until higher temperatures. You'll probably want to use a chisel-tip on your soldering iron, and wet the tip with a bit of solder to help with heat transfer.If you have access to an oscilloscope, this is a fun little kit to probe around! The carrier frequency (~100 MHz) may be outside your scope's bandwidth, but most of the receiver circuitry operates at an intermediate frequency of 70 kHz, and the audio portion will be around ~1 kHz, both of which you can easily measure. So you can observe the ~1mV frequency-modulated 70 kHz IF signal on one channel, and on a second channel bring up the ~0.1V audio signal going to the speaker. Or probe anywhere along the chain rather easily. Fun stuff.

Didnt work. Dealing with it… will update.

Buena práctica de soldadura y algunos componentes como un amplificador operacional y básicos para armar este radio con pequeños ajustes. Es recomendable.

It’s a robust and good project kit to keep my 8 year old from the tablets and phones.

Some people might be disappointed without a frequency display for tuning, but it is a great soldering project, and you end up with a functional FM radio. Various people have designed cases that can be 3D printed, which is a nice finish to the project.

The radio works after assembling almost all components per instructions, though without LED light on;Volume control not very smooth and probably have space to improve the accuracy for circuit design;It'd be good to have digital LED display for the chosen FM radio frequency;If a simple radio case can be provided would be even more desirable;

Tout est fait pour ne pas se tromper.Tout est bien prévu, sauf qu'il faut d'abord traduire les textes en Français pour éviter les petites erreurs de montage.Il faut un petit fer à souder à bout très fin. Il fournissent l'étain, mais j'ai utilisé le mien (il contientun peu de Pb) car il fond plus rapidement. Il faut bien aérer avec un ventilo.Le plus difficile, c'est de régler les spires pour une meilleure réception. Il fonctionne fort et clair si les soudures sont réussies : bien inspecter chaque soudure en cas de bruit bizarre et si besoin titiller chaquecomposant.