The receiver comes complete with a nice brushed aluminum case, knobs & all hardware. It is fairly easy to build and I completed it from start to finish in three hours. The circuitry uses all discrete components and there are only two coils to wind. The receiver uses what is known as a permeability tuned oscillator (PTO), which consists of a straw with a coil of wire wrapped around, and a screw attached to the tuning knob which acts as a slug in the coil. The PTO gives the receiver a nice, wide tuning range. The kit is advertised as having a tuning range of 400 kHz, but I found that my completed kit had a broader range than that.
The kit comes with a construction manual on a mini CD-ROM. The manual is a .pdf file, and the disk also comes with the Adobe Acrobat reader if needed. The kit is aimed at beginners, and you'll notice this in the manual. There are detailed instructions on bending component leads, soldering, coil winding, etc that experienced kit builders will want to ignore. But for a novice builder, the detailed instructions will be most helpful.
The case has just enough room for a 9V battery to fit between the PC board and the side of the case. A 9V battery clip would be a good thing to add since it will keep the battery from rattling around inside the case, however there's not a great deal of room for the battery to move around in so it's not essential.
In building the kit, I found that the PC board left a tight fit for the flanges on the front & back panels to fit between the board & the side of the case. I solved this problem by filing down the edge of the PC board so that the flanges would slide in easily.
One modification I did the the receiver was to add a 1000 uF capacitor between the +9V and ground. This eliminated the tendency of the receiver to "motorboat," or self-oscillate. The addition of the capacitor provides a constant voltage to the receiver. It may be possible to get by with using a smaller value capacitor, but I had at first tried a 220 uF which resulted in some warble on the audio. The next largest size I had was the 1000 uF which totally eliminated the problem. This capacitor is seen in the above photo as the big red one between the on/off switch and the headphone jack.
The other modification I did was to add four rubber feet on the bottom of the case. The kit doesn't come with them, but the rubber feet make it nice to set on a desktop and keep the receiver from sliding around when you are using it.
The Tin Ear receiver is no Watkins-Johnson HF1000, but will provide a lot of enjoyment listening to the 40 meter band. The receiver does experience some overloading from strong 40 meter broadcast stations, but it isn't bad enough to be much of a problem. The Tin Ear would make a great companion receiver for a 40 meter QRP transmitter. More importantly, it should get prospective homebrewers interested in building by using a receiver they built themselves. This is, of course, the original intention of this kit.
My Tin Ear covers from 6947 to 7437 which is 490 kHz of spectrum, a bit wider than the advertised range of 400 kHz. This is plenty of coverage of the entire 40 meter band, plus part of the 39 meter SW broadcast band. It is possible to slew the range of the receiver up & down a bit by sliding the coil one way or the other on the straw.