[Elecraft] RE: Can Elecraft take over the global HF ham radio business ?

[Marinos Markomanolakis, M.D.]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your detailed input on the K2. I personally have built 2 of them, 
the first in 2001 and the 2nd a couple of months ago sn 4618.
I agree 100% with you about the Rx being wonderful, but even in the current 
revised K2s, needs some refinement, mostly getting rid of the many Rx spurs 
scattered in several bands.

On the other hand, as mentioned in my original post, you can hardly justify 
keeping the K2 as the only rig for HF, and making those "bare bones" time 
proven RF design improvements as well as some more subjective ones that 
appeal to many of us: (general coverage, notch, pbt,adding a preselector, 
analog meter, AM receive capability, optimization of the NB, cleaning the 
spurs from the RX etc) can make the package just too good to be ignored by 
the majority of the hams.

As for the radio being in a kit form, that is actually a HUGE selling point, 
regardless of the time and effort required to build it since all hams that I 
have met so far would really love to be able to build their radios instead 
of buying a ready made appliance, provided that the result does not lack in 
any significant RF design respect vs the commercially available units. And I 
am not talking about a million gadgets that you rarely ever use in a rig, 
but basic ant time proven options as the above mentioned.

This is almost a universal definition of a Ham: "he who likes to tinker"

One idea of maintaining serviceability, having excellent shielding between 
boards and adding options to a complex rig like this is a modular design on 
a basic motherboard, just like the TR-7, FT901 series etc. That way 
individual modules can be constructed and tested separately, and many of 
them can be purchased at a later time as the financial or operational 
capability of the owner evolves.

The real problem is that there is a certain amount of "inertia" that has to 
be overcome in the minds of the designers (and customers) before 
consideration can be given to any significant changes and that can be a very 
slow process.

Of course, the other possibility may be that the K2 in its current version 
is designed to provide very reasonable performance while being simple enough 
to maintain a good profit margin for Elecraft.
Nevertheless, an updated design does not necessarily have to be cheap (which 
the K2/100 with options is not), and by gaining widespread acceptance 
worldwide, profits can be improved even with a smaller profit margin per 
unit.

Just some additional thoughts which for sure will create a lot of commotion 
in the official mailing list....
I have absolutely no reservations about the remarkable achievements of the 
Elecraft design team and I thank every and each one of them for giving us 
the pleasure of building serious equipment, but evolution and improvement is 
always good to happen even to the best things in life.

73,
Marinos, ki4gin.

>From: "Stricker, Michael" <Michael.Stricker at gd-ais.com>
>To: <sv9dru at hotmail.com>
>Subject: Can Elecraft take over the global HF ham radio business ?
>Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 08:08:40 -0400
>
>Hi Marinos,
>
>I'm not able to post to the board from work but I'll give you my input.
>
>I think that if you look at the numbers of K2's sold, it compares very 
>favorably to several of the ICOM radios sold.  A couple of examples are the 
>ICOM 765 sold only about 5500 units or so and that is considered an 
>excellent contesting radio and is still sought.  That radio was 
>manufactured for about 7 years.  The ICOM 756 had a run of a bit less than 
>5000 and although it suffered from a faulty LCD display, it is still 
>considered a decent radio.  That was made for 3 or 4 years before being 
>updated to a pro.  The ICOM 775 sold fewer than 3000 units and that had a 
>run of about 5 or 6 years.  And lastly, the 781 had a run of near 3000 
>units for 6+ years.
>
>The K2 is 6 or 7 years old so it really is doing pretty well in the realm 
>of high end radios.
>
>Personally, I think that it is nearing the end of product life cycle.  The 
>QST report on the K2/100 DSP article summed it up quite eloquently in 
>stating that there are only so many buttons available to do so many things 
>and it is now becoming a task to operate all the features.  In my opinion, 
>Elecraft would do well by offering the same basic design in a desktop 
>variant so that they could make the controls easier to operate and allocate 
>some of the menu driven functions to independent switch controls or 
>potentiometer/variable controls.  The reality is that very few designs that 
>would alter the RF performance would need to change to make it more 
>appealing to a larger market.
>
>I'm interested in high performance receivers.  I have been through all of 
>the aforementioned ICOMs and opted to procure a Drake R4C and perform all 
>the Sherwood Engineering modifications.  That is an impressive piece of 
>equipment.  I was going to wait to build a post 5000 serial number K2 
>however, an opportunity presented itself to buy a very late model serial 
>number K2 that was built up.  I figured that I'd rather evaluate one before 
>putting in 50+ hours and finding out that I am not satisfied.
>
>So far my experience with my K2 is good.  It is certainly better than many 
>receivers I've used in the past.  It certainly is not as convenient to use, 
>however.  My R4C is better than the K2 and I expected that it would be.  I 
>like the K2 and I would like it a lot more if it were a bigger radio with 
>some independent controls.
>
>If the K2 was to "take over" I think that Elecraft would have to have an 
>option of it being factory built.  Many people don't have the time to 
>experiment with a radio to find that it isn't suitable for their purpose.  
>In my case, I wanted to be sure that I wanted this radio for the long term. 
>  Now that I am, I will plan on selling my K2 in the future and building 
>one myself...especially if Elecraft does make it larger.
>
>Just some ideas.
>
>Mike, WA1SEO