Reddit reviews Build Your Own Transistor Radios: A Hobbyist's Guide to High-Performance and Low-Powered Radio Circuits

I recommend (Bob Cordell's audio power amplifier book) , (The Art Of Electronics 3rd edition) , and (Ron Quan's DIY radio book)

If these seem too advanced, check out the author "Forrest Mims III" and/or the "who needs theory" book (Practical Electronics For Inventors)

You don't need a license to listen, but studying for the license forces you to learn some things that are useful to know, like which frequencies hams have privileges for, bandwidths, power limitations, and such. I doubt it would be a waste of your time. And as another person mentioned, tech is easy.

I have an A/E license but I have yet to touch a transmitter (I'm a listener right now). I learned a lot of stuff that was useless to me and my interests (e.g. I have no interest in packet modes), but I learned a lot of stuff that helped me understand what's going on.

Ham is huge in that there are a ton of different areas you can get into depending on what you're interested in. Some people are into the cutting edge technology. Some are interested in keeping the old tech alive.

If you're interested in building receivers from scratch--try the ARRL Handbooks from whatever era you're interested in (tubes, transistors, ICs). They're full of projects.

Also this: http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Transistor-Radios-High-Performance/dp/0071799702

If you have more specific interests, tell us and we can give you better advice.

This only deals with receiving, not transmitting, but I've heard good things about the book Build Your Own Transistor Radios: A Hobbyist's Guide to High-Performance and Low-Powered Radio Circuits.

Here's the description from Amazon:

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A DIY guide to designing and building transistor radios

Create sophisticated transistor radios that are inexpensive yet highly efficient. Build Your Own Transistor Radios: A Hobbyist’s Guide to High-Performance and Low-Powered Radio Circuits offers complete projects with detailed schematics and insights on how the radios were designed. Learn how to choose components, construct the different types of radios, and troubleshoot your work. Digging deeper, this practical resource shows you how to engineer innovative devices by experimenting with and radically improving existing designs.

Build Your Own Transistor Radios covers:

• Calibration tools and test generators
• TRF, regenerative, and reflex radios
• Basic and advanced superheterodyne radios
• Coil-less and software-defined radios
• Transistor and differential-pair oscillators
• Filter and amplifier design techniques
• Sampling theory and sampling mixers
• In-phase, quadrature, and AM broadcast signals
• Resonant, detector, and AVC circuits
• Image rejection and noise analysis methods

This is the perfect guide for electronics hobbyists and students who want to delve deeper into the topic of radio.

Yes. Ronald Quan's (book on homemade radios) advocates the dirt cheap LM318 opamp, available from electronics surplus stores, hobbyist websites (example), and even legitimate electronics distributors like Arrow, Element 14, Mouser, and DigiKey. Its gain-bandwidth product is 15 MHz so the OP can use one to construct a preamp with a gain of +30dB (31.6x) for 0.125 MHz input signals. Need more than +30dB of gain? Cascade two of them!

This book is excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Transistor-Radios-High-Performance/dp/0071799702/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1449635420&sr=8-3&keywords=building+radio

Electronics: Build Your Own Transistor Radios: A Hobbyist's Guide to High-Performance and Low-Powered Radio Circuits https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071799702