I was licensed as SP8FWB in 1972 in Hrubieszow, Poland.
My first station was a Russian tank radio RT10 modified for 40 and 80m.
My second one was homebrewed 6 tube 20m SSB transceiver with a filter made of 2 crystals.
My next set of receiver and transmitter for 80-15m used tubes except for VFO, with finals by 2 x GU50 for about 150 W out. To acquire two 4 crystal SSB filters I scavenged 10 crystals from fixed-frequency plugins in surplus military radios and tuned the crystals with a pencil. With this radio I earned SP DXCC and about 165 countries. My antennas were G5RV, 20m vertical on the roof, and for a short time before it collapsed, a 20m 2 el beam.
My last radio constructed when in college, was all solid state except for a driver and a 829 final. It used a MOSFET preamp, diode mixers, and two 4 crystal filters to implement RF speech processing on transmit and noise filtering on receive. It had only a small transformer as 600V for the final was derived directly from 220C by a doubler. So one prong in 220V was directly wired to the chassis!
Because of RF speech processing, the radio was running circles around HW100 or similar rigs without speech processing. Also this radio had a very clear copy on 40m, a very busy band in EU at that time.
The radio worked well on 80 and 40m but was less stable on 20 and up. Perhaps because diodes and toroids for the mixers were of unknown type and probably inadequate.