[AMRadio] Parts

[Rob Atkinson]

> Did China buy a billion of everything when things came out, just waiting for production to cease so they would be the only supplier?  I have struggled in repairing an Icom 718 and 765 for friends, not the troubleshooting, but procuring parts.  Transistors that are only available on Epay, affordable with inexpensive shipping, but nobody in the US has them.  The 718 is still in inventory, and being sold, but Icom does not support it, components I needed were only in China, and Icom America has not received a crystal filter shipment from Japan since 2018, so if you have an Icom you would like to put a filter in, and all the commercial vendors say out of stock, that is the reason.
>

This is a great argument for avoiding plastic radios however China has
a near monopoly on glass tubes and ceramic parts also.  It has to do
with manufacturing costs and the free market.  When tube demand
dropped, U.S. manufacturers such as Cetron did not have enough revenue
to pay for their costs, mostly domestic labor and taxes.  In a lot of
cases factory equipment (in general, not just tubes) was sold to
Chinese, dismantled and shipped over there.  Probably the same for
transistors.  Tube and socket production isn't going to last even in
China, except maybe a few tubes audiophools like (anything single
ended) because h.v. tube RF has gone solid state so there's no market
for the h.v. RF parts like anything having to do with an anode to 50
ohm matching network.  For ham, Ameritron is about the only tube
leenyar manufacturer left at least in U.S., and I expect their tube
production to end in the next 10 years because most of the market for
tube leenyars has vanished as contesters go full on solid state.


> If there are any ARRL members on the list left besides me, did anyone else get miffed at the 'Second Century' op-ed piece?  When she said it wasn't the ARRL, it was us when it came to changes,  my memory quickly went back to the ARRL big wig that hated AM and actively pursued getting the FCC to ban it as a ham mode.
>

I think that's the one authored by one of the relatively new QST
editors.  Those people are J School graduates with little ham
experience who have been at ARRL at most 10 years and probably do not
know of the ARRL's institutional history and anti-AM stance.  QST is
now mostly oriented towards arduino/FT8/stealth/tuna tin QRP and
fossils running converted broadcast rigs who remember the slopbucket
wars may as well be on Pluto as far as the new editorial staff is
concerned.

73
Rob
K5UJ