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Heathkit Educational Systems Closes Shop For Good
scharkalvin writes with this excerpt from the American Radio Relay League's site: "'For the second time since 1992, Heathkit Educational Services (HES) has shuttered its doors. Rumors of the legendary kit-building company's demise were posted on QRZ.com, with several readers bringing the news to the attention of the ARRL. In August 2011, Heathkit announced it was returning to the kit building business, and in September, that it would once again be manufacturing Amateur Radio kits. ... On LinkedIn, a popular networking site, HES Chief Executive Officer Lori Marciniak listed her employment ending at Heathkit as of March 2012. Likewise, Heathkit's Marketing and Sales Director Ernie Wake listed his employment ending in April 2012. An unsubstantiated report on Wikipedia states that "[in] December 2011, Heathkit Educational Systems laid off most employees and in March 2012, the company indefinitely suspended operations."' It looks like Heathkit is gone for good. Their plans on re-entering the kit market died with the current economy."
This is a sad day for education in America. I remember as a kid building stuff with HeathKit products. I guess no one wants to learn how things work and build them anymore. This, I would guess, is prime example of how education is dwindling. I am a proponent of lifelong learning too.
sorry to hear it, a lot of hams were eagerly awaiting product.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Sad to see it go because it's kind of iconic of a culture who grew up to be scientists and engineers. Something really rare these days. The majority of kids these days are either out playing soccer or inside on the Xbox, DS or whatever. The majority have no more interest in Space than occasionally glancing up at the moon and no more interest in electrical engineering than how many gigs and how to plug it in.
I think kids were more fascinated with technology in the 70s because there wasn't much of it around. Even color TV wasn't mainstream. These days, kids are saturated with it. The thought of building something just doesn't appeal to them.
I don't think the market would have been there for Heathkit. The puttering around of a bunch of old geezers just isn't enough to run a company on.
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That seems contrary to the growth of companies like SparkFun, Adafruit, the popularity of Arduinos, etc.
My HW101 and my 35mhz scope will be ophaned at last. Fond memories and fund times. That 100 watt radio let me talk with Sidney from Chicago like they were in the next room, and Argentina. That was wonderful and using the first microcomputer I built myself and turned into a terminal. Sigh
My guess is that Heath was already deep in red ink when they decided to re-enter the kit market. They probably wanted to ride the current maker movement. Maybe if their creditors had given them enough time they could have saved the company with new kit products. Just look at Adafruit.com, Evilmadscience.com, or Sparkfun.com and you will see that there IS a demand for kits. No one ever did kits better than Heath. I'm sorry to be the reporter of the bad news. RIP Heathkit.
I don't know if the market would have been there.
I used to dabble with transmitters when I was 16-17. Very cool, since that was at a time just before the internet and it made my world a whole lot bigger all of a sudden. Today, I can talk to anyone on the planet over the intertubes...
Similarly, I recently wanted to receive NOAA satellite images. I got a cheap digital tuner dongle, installed GNU radio on linux and built a cool antenna. No need to buy a kit anywhere.
Also recently, I wanted to build a device around a PIC micro controller. I was able to find all of the information on line, draw a professional dual layer PCB in KiCad and have it made at a very low cost. No need for kits either here.
I say the kit is dead. As much as I like building things and the idea of kits, now I can build from scratch with all of the information at my fingertips or use of the shelf hardware and a linux PC.
Surely the name and brand are worth SOMETHING. Hasn't anyone purchased the rights to the name or logo?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
When Heathkit was big, radios were hand-assembled by middle-aged women in Chicago. Now, they're hand-assembled by underpaid Chinese workers.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
What annoys me is that a Zuckerberg or a Simonyi or a Cameron could bankroll Heathkit, one of the root enablers of geekdom and a true part of technical history in the US, for less than they spend on tropical fish, and for less of their attention than merely uttering the phrase "make it happen".
Yes, I know, Heathkit chose bad timing to reenter the kit business. They should have laid low, held onto their IP, and waited until the economy was on an upswing. And no company is too big, or too small, or too geeky, to fail. But surely Heathkit deserves more.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Check out Ramsey Electronics sometime. I have build several of there kits with my kids. My only gripe with them is that they do not offer the source code for any of there microcontroller-based projects, and seemed to get offended when I asked.
At the time Heathkit stopped producing kits their kit business WAS profitable. Their executives just didn't want to be in that business anymore. They wanted to solely be an education company. At the time there were all sorts of articles stating this.
Here's a question, once they dropped the kits who was their customer?
Schools? Certainly not. Schools are busy teaching a state defined curriculum that does little more for teaching kids about technology and building things than would a lifetime spent finger painting. They weren't going to buy anything from Heath. If they thought schools were going to keep them in business then I would like to know what they were smoking!
Universities? Maybe... I don't know, any EEs out there want to speak up and say they did or did not use Heath materials in their classes? I'm guessing not As a CS major I never had a class with any sort of company provided program. It was just textbooks, mostly only read in certain parts and out of order following the professor's personal syllabus. Is EE different? Do universities use Heath for EE? Come on EE majors, respond and let me know!
Were they going to make a living selling courses to individuals? I haven't checked their offerings in quite a while and their site currently says to call for prices. When I did check some years ago I could have just about obtained a degree from an accredited university for the price. Why would anyone buy a course from Heath?
Was this the wrong time to get back into the kit business? I really doubt it. With the maker movement of today? Sure, most of society is very non-technical, non-geek preferring a night of brain-dead reality tv over building something but has it ever been any different? If you got in your Delorian and went back to the 50s when Heathkit was in it's prime do you really think you could pick any average person off the street, question them and expect to hear about the great new kit they assembled last Friday night? Yeah, right! But would you find anything like today's maker movement? People so into making that they commit to creating organizations with overhead like hackerspaces? I think this is a better time for a kit business then there has been in a long time, maybe ever. Heath came back with too little too late. Did they even really intend to succeed?
The mystery to me is what has kept Heath around all this time since they first discontinued kits? My suspicion is that nothing has. I don't think they were trying, I think they were just disassembling the company very very slowly so the money they made years ago could go into somebody's pocket without getting them in trouble. That's my theory anyway.
"And very difficult to keep viable from a business perspective." Umm -- it's called AMATEUR radio for a reason! Still manufacturers such as Yaseu, Kenwood, ICom, Wouxon, TenTec and probably others seem to do all right, as do several large vendors and numerous small ones.
"Clinging to nostalgia for nostalgia's sake" -- What's wrong with that? Not every ham is in to old school gear, hams also get into things like SDR, digital audio/data, etc... but for those that get nostalgic for the glowing warm tubes of an old boat anchor what's wrong with them indulging themselves?
"Kind of fun too" -- What more point do you need?
"You want to learn how things work? You fire up GNUradio and hack a flow-graph" -- Ok, that's one viable method to learn something and certainly not something I would discourage anyone from doing. Real devices still do use components though. I've never seen a consumer SDR with the exception of some ham equipment though so I'm not sure how much it will teach you about the devices around you. GNURadio was started by a ham btw
"Transceivers can be bought by the hand-full now - they are the 'new' discreet components." -- Really? Where? Do tell! I suppose there are some low speed single channel data only transcievers that are pretty affordable. Then there are more advanced things like Xbee which I certainly wouldn't want to buy by the handful out of my pocket! If you know a source of transcievers that are capable of voice and data and video and all the other things hams do and a normal person could afford to buy 'by the handful' then please share!!
"...there are very real reasons why the majority of people no longer..." -- The majority of people don't really do much of anything! Especially anything one would discuss on Slashdot!
"Not at all surprising that a business built on an dead model didn't survive." -- Ahh... I agree with you there! But what was Heath's business model? Sell expensive courses in a day when MIT, Stanford and others are giving them away for free while vaguely promising to eventually sell a small number of kits?
Heathkits would imperil children. They'd be inspired to go on and build things of their own, but anything they'd make would violate 100 frivolous patents, so what's the point in inventing anything?
As stated in another post: "At the time Heathkit stopped producing kits their kit business WAS profitable. Their executives just didn't want to be in that business anymore. They wanted to solely be an education company."
Problem is, Heath's educational stuff was always pretty lame. In audio and amateur gear, they really shone. And they made some really nice test gear, too. I still have my Heath Audio Oscillator, and the Distortion Analyzer. Neither was quite as good as an HP, but they were way less money, and were good candidates for hobbyist upgrades.
Their educational stuff was not only lame, but overpriced. The rest of their offerings were solid value. Even their PC-clone (808x, 1983 or so) was well done and good value.
I built Heathkits, so did my dad. I'd say they will be missed, but I have missed them since they bailed on the business that made them.
--- Bill
the wax-ender filter caps used on countless scopes out of Heath were not reliable and shorted a lot. replace with epoxy-fill from some source like CDE, and as long as you didn't kill the transformer, you should have it fixed for good.
if you did kill the transformer, flip some filament transformer insulated to 1500 or 2500 volts backwards, feed from the AC line, and that will suffice.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
There's always been brain dead and easy options for entertainment - and the type of kids who sought out Heathkits have always been in a distinct minority. The golden age you allude to never existed.
On top of which, as another poster said, kids that are interested in that kind of thing today have Mindstorm, or simulation games, or programming, or other things that weren't available back in Heathkit's heyday.
they sold duplication of their manuals a couple years ago, and the new owner has been assertive in getting the copy sites to take down their files. they did retain all rights to the manuals, however, so that is an asset in liquidation, assuming Heathkit doesn't get up again.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
first, they had a lot of dust on the boxes in the warehouse. second, a major reason was that we as a society lost the ability to wait a little while for the new shiny, and lost the ability to work for it. you had to build a heathkit. it didn't come off the shelf in a shiny 4-color package and crackle with excitement as soon as you plugged it in. there was a lot of "install diode D134, insuring polarity band matches with the band on the circuit board. bend leads over and solder." check the box. "install transistor Q112, insuring tab matches the mark on the circuit board. bend leads over and solder." check the box. check the box at the bottom of the page. turn the page.
I think it was the "turn the page" part that people couldn't get around to any more.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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