Review on Master the Art of Soldering with VOGURTIME: Your Ultimate Electronics Learning and Practice Tool by Kenny Hrdlicka

Electronics has been a hobby of mine for decades, so my grandchildren aged 5, 8 and 10 built a radio under my supervision without much effort. The included instructions are detailed enough for any beginner, but I was interested in more detailed instructions as well as how the internet service works. To my surprise, I received a prompt and very polite response even though it was Sunday afternoon. Having worked on many other projects I consider this kit to be one of the best. FM reception is excellent, AM reception is mediocre. At first glance, I didn't like the unusual vertical placement of the ferrite antenna. However, after trying it out, I see an advantage for beginners: the reception is consistent from all directions. If the axis of the ferrite antenna is pointed towards the transmitter, signal reception will be minimal. A little further from this angle, the reception seems about the same, mainly due to the automatic gain control. This feature can be used to suppress unwanted strong signals near weak signals. Most people are unaware of the signal minimums for ferrite or loop antennas, and this can add to the confusion. If you only want to find minimal reception, simply put the radio down and turn it over. I have a Grunding AN-200 loop antenna and it's a good tool for teaching kids about resonance if you place a ferrite antenna in a parallel axis loop. I converted an Elenco AM780 radio so that I can connect the loop antenna directly to the input. The Elenco AM780 radio uses direct amplification with a classic envelope demodulator (easy for beginners), while Yogurtime uses a complex Si4825-A10 chip with a quadrature demodulator (which requires more education to understand the concept). I spent about $100 on the devices shown in the picture and that may seem excessive. In my experience, it's better to spend more money on quality kits with excellent documentation than to deal with too many parts and no documentation (my experience building a superheterodyne radio from China). Today children are distracted by computer games and their attention span is too short for my taste. Rather start with projects with fewer details, excellent instructions and therefore a short path to success. The Vogurtime radio kit is definitely a good choice.