I too used to use those Radio Shack kits with the spring terminals, & loved it! I wound up teaching myself so much that I was able to start in 'Year 2' of a loc

I too used to use those Radio Shack kits with the spring terminals, & loved it! I wound up teaching myself so much that I was able to start in 'Year 2' of a local vocational school for electronics repair- just from what I learned from those kits. Later on, I felt limited by how they were designed, and found that 'Free Radio Berkeley' sold kits to build pirate radio stations, which I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever found, so I ordered some kits from them to work on. It turned out that the kits were missing quite a few parts (which weren't available through Radio Shack), so I had to search & find mail-order electronics suppliers to order the missing parts from. Another thing that was 'wrong' with these kits, which I had to find a solution for, was that they only included pictorial schematics- no use of standard electronic schematics like you'd find everywhere else. So I had to draw my own schematics based on what was present on the circuit boards. This eventually helped me in the long run, as I was able to bring the transmitter + the schematics I drew up to job interviews, & I landed my first electronics repair job based on my work on the transmitter. EDIT: Another thing you might look into that I found educational/fun is mods for CB radios. A good CB shop can sell you a CB Radio & parts which allow you to make some changes & add extra functions by making simple alterations to the circuit boards. I added more wattage, a frequency slider, extra channels above & below the standard 40, & sideband to a Cobra 148GTL back in the day. There was a small community of people on the radio where I grew up, & I would stay up late at night talking with them on my fancy radio. Later I got a linear amplifier, but was always afraid to use it since they're illegal- so I got rid of that to play it safe.