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Reviews For: Heathkit HR-1680

Category: Receivers: Amateur Radio

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Review Summary For : Heathkit HR-1680
Reviews: 16MSRP: 349.95
Description:
Heathkit receiver...companion to the HT-1680
Product is not in production
More Info: http://
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
00164.4
N6KYS Rating: 2007-02-10
Not bad for its age Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I built this rig once it was offered as the replacement for the HR-10B, and enjoyed it back then. Since then (the 1970's), I've owned several, and all have worked well. Not the most sensitive receivers ever built, and quite lacking in features even for its day, but it was a very good receiver for the intended user.....the Novice to General CW/SSB operator. One thing that was very strange was that Heath made its companion transmitter, the HX-1681, just a CW transmitter......thereby not even taking full advantage of the features (SSB) designed into the HR-1680 receiver. Also, the HR-1680 couldn't receive Am signals alone, which was disappointing, and since the HR-10B was such a poor receiver, the HR-1680 one would have been a good companion to the DX-60B transmitter if it could have received AM. Overall, not a bad receiver, if you can find one for a bargain. One thing though.....one of the solid state devices that had its own heat sink, and I can't remember which one it was (something in the audio amplification comes to mind), got very hot during operation, and would fail at times. Some modification ideas were placed out into the ham community, so try and dig up what that mod was, and do it.....it will save you some grief later.
K6WHP Rating: 2007-01-22
Surprising for an "older" radio Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Never owned one of these but got to use one one afternoon and I was impressed. Mainly, because there's acres of space inside the radio and -- like the K2 -- if you build it (or have the assembly/operation manual) you can service it. The only drawback is that the original configuration has the old, hot dial lights near the VFO causing drift. The going advice is to replace them with LEDs and save the heartache.

..anyone out there got a 1680 they want to part with?
M0WQR Rating: 2007-01-16
Good Old Work Horse Time Owned: more than 12 months.
Bought mine new at Benton Harbor in the 1970's. It has never failed. Has excellent sensitivity and has been used for cw mostly. And just keeps working.
WA3SIMI Rating: 2004-02-24
great sensitivity Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I bought and built this about 25 years ago. I got back into the hobby and fired this thing up.

It has excellent sensitivity, and I prefer the audio on this relic to my brand new state of the art Yaesu transceiver!

After a few minutes of "warm-up" (solid state) it is very stable.

Only problem: the front end will oscillate if the antenna impedance is too high.
VR2XMQ Rating: 2003-11-09
Good Receiver Time Owned: more than 12 months.
This was an unexpected surprise. A friend sent one to me after he bought it on Ebay for about $65.00 with the matching speaker. He thought it was a general coverage and did not realize it was a ham band only rx.

I was surprised by the audio and quality of the rx, a good standby rx and it looks great! analogue orange dial and S meter. It's looks are similar to the SB-104.

A good standby receiver to have around.
FORMER_K6ZL_RS Rating: 2003-08-21
Receiver with a surprise Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I bought mine off of E-bay, on a whim. 'Cause it was cheap ($60.00) had nothing to do with it! After cleaning the "plug in, plug out" cards it took right off. Stable, and sounds very good. All I did, was parallel a 6mfd cap with the existing avc cap, to give it slower avc. For a plain vanilla Heathkit (you really don't expect that much) This is a Nice radio. I'm glad I own it. Beware CW/SSB only, no AM detector.