During my childhood radio was a miracle device. You can communicate to miles and miles away without any strings attached. I always wanted to know how this works.
This was a time there were no cable to TV. There was TV, but just two channels, the DD1 and DD2. These were from government run Doordarshan. There were no mobile phones. Phones were still wired ones. Just around that time they got upgraded to the digital clicking type from the dialing type. There were still telephone exchanges. There was still telegram and morse code. There was no internet. And we used to have radio stations in medium wave, short wave and FM. There were only government run radio stations. Among many electronics experts HAM radio was a big thing. Today we cannot even think of living without internet and mobile phones, but back then with a battery and a radio you can communicate to/from half way across the globe using only nature's free ionosphere.
One of my uncle was an ITI graduate and was actively working on his trade. He was very successful on that. On one of my summer vacations I came across his old text books. There were few books on radio technology, repair and maintenance. There were also technician handbooks. During the entire vacation I was heavily going through these books. The books were mostly talking about radio theory based on valve radios. But after covering all the basic concepts in the middle of the book it switches to solid state devices and explains how the same radios are implemented using transistors and diodes. Since I was not well versed on solid state devices, not everything was quite clear to me.
Over the course of almost next two years my understanding on these things got quite better. More over from my other experiments I was more confident on building a radio on my own. As the first step, one of the designs from the technicians handbook was selected with few customisations. Next, bought a radio PCB board available locally. The L-Board was a commonly used variant at the time. It took almost 7-8 months collecting all the necessary components for this design. For various reasons I was not able to complete this implementation for a long time.
Finally in 1995 I started assembling the radio. The L-Board was nothing but a PCB board on the 'L' shape. It had the the RF section on the longer axis and followed by it a smaller audio section on the other axis. It was mostly a push-pull amplifier audio circuit. Back then all these sections were implemented with discrete components. Nowadays on many circuits IC chips are used instead of this.
The most complex part of building the radio was never assembling the circuit board but the fine tuning of the the whole RF circuit section. I had few elder friends who were actively working on radio repairs to give pointers on these matters.
