When I was 10 or 11 years old in the early 1960s, one of my best friends, Scott Simonds, lived about 2,565 feet away from my house on Calmar Avenue. Scott lived Mandana Blvd, just below Ashmount Ave. That distance was significant because I thought that the Knight Kit C-555 Superhet Walkie Talkie Transceiver Kit would be a great way for Scott and I to keep in touch.
The 1964 Allied Radio catalog (page 2) said that the walkie talkies had a 3/4 mile (~1.2 km) operating range with their 100 mw input. (Currently in the U.S., FRS – Family Radio Service – has a 2 watt maximum)
I thought that I could build the kit because, my father, for some reason, owned a Weller Junior Model 8100 Soldering Gun. After soldering the components to the circuit board, the walkie talkies didn’t work. Unfortunately, troubleshooting the kit was a little beyond the my capabilities when I was 11 years old. Fortunately, my Uncle Jimmy went through them and he got the C-555 walkie talkies talking to each other.
One modification that I made was to replace the battery connectors with the common PP3 9V Battery Snap Connectors. The original design used a PP4 (Eveready 226, NEDA 1600) cylindrical 9V battery with a snap connector at each end. (see Joe Haupt’s flickr photo)
The ironic thing about this is that I don’t recall ever actually talking to Scott using these walkie talkies from my house to his.
For some reason, 61 years later, I still have both of these walkie talkies in my possession.