I found one of those 160 in one Science Fair kits that radio shack used to make at a yard sale last week and bought it because I remembered that they all seem to have plans for an AM radio station. I got it home and sure enough, it's there!! I was curious about the possibility of boosting it to a few watts or so with an amp circuit. I have an old Medium Wave Alliance circuit that uses 2nnn's to boost but not sure about this. Any Ideas?
You'd be much better off to just buy a part 15 AM transmitter like the ones Ramsey sells or maybe get a nice one like the SSTran. They put out 100milliwatts and could be hooked into a linear amplifier to get them up to a few watts.
I don't suggest using those radio shack learning kits for anything serious. They are useful only to learn about electronics and that's it. Even at that, the simple one or two transistor AM transmitter projects for them put out so little power you are lucky if you could pick it up on the other side of the house. You could experiment and add another transistor to the antenna output on the kit board for fun to get a tiny bit more range.
I know that on it's own it won't do anything, I was interested in the possibility of feeding it into some stages. I'm curious about how much power it can be tweaked to on it's own by increasing it enough to power a small amp. It's a toy, but the Ramsey things aren't much more than toys are they? It already is an exciter, why not use it.
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