I had a 6 metre transceiver back in Canada. I built it from a Heathkit, which shows you how long ago that was. The great thing about Heathkit is that you could send it to them to debug things that you might stuff up. There was no online support in those days, it was by telephone or snail mail.
The thing I found out in doing that, was that I much preferred building the radio to actually talking to people on it.