My first shortwave radio was the Heathkit GR-78. My parents gave it to me for my 15th birthday, and although Heath indicated that it was a "10 Evening" kit, I was so excited that I stayed up for 2 nights straight and built the kit in about two and a half days. Although I was careful with building the GR-78, I did ignore a lot of the warnings about alignment of the RF deck. The manual would say "don't adjust the slug in L99, it is preset at the factory" but I would anyhow. Unfortunately, this meant that my GR-78 probably never performed as well as it should have. I did enjoy it a great deal regardless. I heard my first HF aero stations on the 8 Mhz band on this radio.
The key weaknesses this receiver had were a very weak front end, and no selection of IF bandwidth filters, and poor frequency resolution. The design was a single conversion to 455 kHz so image rejection was very poor, but it made the receiver sound "hot", especially on a large external antenna that delivers strong signals. The internal battery didn't have a great deal of capacity, so portable operation was a relatively short lived activity.
For the money (CDN $200 in 1976) it was a fair receiver for the dollar. Unfortunately, during the time I had this set, my listening was very disorganized (I'm sure that it still is, relatively speaking) so I can't recall my best catch with it, but I do remember that it was very portable and I did drag it everywhere with me.
Thanks go to Bryce, KI0LE , for having the only image of a Heath GR-78 on the Internet.