[Elecraft] Re-posted interesting comments Fwd: [GQRP] Do-it-all Kits

[Stuart Rohre]

I think there is a difference in broadness of kit lines, (different kits)
and quality of a kit manufacturer.
Certainly over its lifetime, Heath had more variety of kits.  Ten Tec holds
that distinction among kit manufacturers in USA today.   The only other wide
range kit co. that comes to mind is Velleman of Belgium, also sold in USA.

Quality is made up of service and support, durability of designs, goodness
of circuit boards, and most of all to me,  readability, and ease of use of
the manual.  Ten Tec has higher manual quality than Heath because they use
all the inserts, schematics, and teaching aids in the manual, like or
exceeding Heath, but also innovated with a true spiral bound, workshop
enabled, manual whose pages lie flat on the workbench while you are using
it.

Ten Tec boards and especially Elecraft, are higher quality than Heath were,
from use of fiberglass stock and masking of the board as well as superior
silk screening of component identifications.   Heath did several marginal
performance, or less reliable ham designs.  Their DX 35 used a couple of
stages in series for plate voltage, and that rig suffered transformer
failures.  Several later designs had numerous problems.  Their two meter
crystal controlled transceiver had intermittents due to push button switches
that were not well suited to RF switching duty.  The Heath HW 100 and 101
used fragile belt drives for some variable capacitors.   The QRP HW 7 and 8
variable capacitors eventually fall apart because of poor stop design.  The
toroids in HW8 rigs seem to go bad over time.  True, a couple of these are
component failures that perhaps were hard to predict, but goes to quality of
components chosen issues.

Elecraft has very conservative, well tested designs, which are superior in
the case of receivers to the kit superhet from Ten Tec.  However, as a
general SWL radio, the Ten Tec is very effective for the price.
Ten Tec has two levels of kits.  Simple designs for most bang for the buck,
test and accessory functions and very well done ham kits, with a few
exceptions, (easily remedied), in their QRP transceivers.

Elecraft has outstanding transceiver specifications and has achieved a very
great place in receiver design quality even over commercially assembled
transceivers from all other manufacturers in the case of the sensitive and
wide range K2.

In some cases, Heath used what components were available, and that affected
reliability of the time.
The modern manufacturers have benefited from better printed circuit boards
vs. cost, cooler running components, and more integrated and modular designs
made possible by ICs.

Heath had cases of shipping bad components, which is less likely among
today's robotically assembled components.   It is hard and perhaps unfair to
compare Heath and successors.  Heath deserves a lot of credit for pioneering
the kit concepts used universally today by even very small 1- 3 model kit
suppliers.  But time has moved on, and better designs for the money are
available now.
The sophistication of small kits containing microprocessor controls rival
the best designs from Heath.
73,
Stuart
K5KVH