[1000mp] cost of improved IMD performance

Tue, 16 Apr 2002 10:28:47 -0600

Jeffrey:

I was intrigued by your materials estimate of $350.00 for FT1000MP
components. It is not unreasonable I suspect for a product that had an
initial retail price of about $2500.00 .(about 15% of the retail pricing,
although desired pricing is tied to value not cost)

As you clearly know, changes to an existing design have other costs, often
much more than the cost of parts. There is the engineering and testing and
prototyping needed to assure that the changes actually do what they purport
to do and do not introduce other problems (law of unintended consequences).
The engineering change documentation will cost money. The training changes
and service manual changes will cost money. Since there will be two versions
of the product in the market at the same time there will be costs associated
with stocking replacement parts. There will changes to the procedures in
manufacturing which means costs associated with procurement, vendor and
parts qualification, production line fixtures changes, production line
procedures training, etc. I suspect I have omitted some additional costs.

None of the above will necessarily mean that the changes cannot or should
not be done, but I list them only to suggest that estimating parts cost may
be too imprecise a way to determine what it might cost to make a change to
an existing product. In the case of a new product, however, many of the
costs I list are shared by the entire product, not the incremental change.

If we use the 8:1 ratio between parts cost and retail pricing (as you and I
have estimated them), we are faced with what appears to be a $240.00
increase in the retail price to accommodate the $30 parts change. I will be
the first to admit that this is an imperfect model of what might be the
increase in price if the specifications are improved. Still, it is at least
a better estimate than no estimate or just knowing the parts cost increase.

I wonder how many folks would knowingly say, "Yep, I really support having a
truly good transmitter in my radio and I am willing to spend an extra $240
to have it --- even though I can buy a radio that has just as much power
output and sounds just as good to me and my friends on the air for $240
less"!

You and I and a few others might have the money to do it and be willing to
do it, but I worry that we would not be a sufficiently large group to
influence such a decision --- I don't know.

I think that revised firmware for the FT1000MP might improve some things
too, but the cost of getting it to market is probably much greater than the
profit needed to cover that cost so that there can be future products.
Sadly, that is the way the technical marketplace works (as I suspect that
you know).

73,

Tod, KOTO

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Jeffrey Pawlan
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 9:21 AM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: [1000mp] cost of improved IMD performance

On Tue, 16 Apr 2002, Hare,Ed, W1RFI wrote:

> > It would be refreshing to see: "the transmit IMD of this product is
> > simply not acceptable for a modern radio.  We would expect to see
> > third order IMD results at least -36 dB and fifth order products
> > at least -46 dB.  Any manufacturer that releases a product which
> > fails to achieve that standard simply does not care about the
> > amateur market!"
>
> And you are willing to pay how much for this improvement?
>
> 73,
> Ed Hare, W1RFI

I have designed many receivers and transmitters and can see that the
materials
cost within the 1000mp is under $350.00 and depending on the size of their
manufacturing run, it may be much less than that. The additional cost of
making
the IMD improvement as stated above is probably less than $30.00. This
cannot be
done as a retrofit; it is a different design.

73,

Jeffrey Pawlan, WA6KBL

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