[Elecraft] Whose radio? People vote with their pocketbooks. Only election day counts.

[lstavenhagen]

Great post! 
I would specifically second the "incremental/optional approach to product
features" part, myself tho all the rest of Guy's points are totally spot on,
IMO. But in my case, this has been reason #1 I've gone to elecraft products
instead of the competitors.

For me, the greatest value is you can configure your K3 (or K2) with
whatever options you want and not have to pay for options you don't need at
the time or don't want. But you still get the highest performing RX on the
market and all the functionality in the basic rig.

That you couldn't do that always drove me nuts with the Big 3 and even Ten
Tec - it wasn't that I wanted this or that feature in a particular rig, but
it was what I wish it _didn't_ have so that I didn't have to pay for it. All
I wanted was a good basic configuration with good high performance. A CW
filter and I'm ok - add an ant. tuner and built-in keyer and I"m really
happy. but there was no such option available from any of these
manufacturers. Either I could get an inferior basic rig, or I could get a
fairly good to very good RX/TX but with loads of other stuff I didn't want -
pretty screens, knobs for every function, the size and weight of a Hummer,
useless features that looked nice and on and on.

I prefer stripped, but good quality radios. The only ones I could find that
met that requirement on the entire market were the elecraft products. My K2,
for example, has the NB module and the internal ant. tuner only. My K3 is
the basic 10W version with only the internal ant. tuner, a 400hz 8 pole
filter and the 1ppm TCXO. That's it on both - the K3 may eventually get the
KPA3 and maybe another filter or two at some point, but that's probably all
I'm going to end up needing for it.

So I'd submit this as another strength of Elecraft's approach - they offer
the option of fewer options, an escape from the "featurism" of the
competition (a phenomenon we're all too familiar with in the software
industry as well). This may not appeal to that large of a market segment,
but it sure got my business hi hi.

73,
LS
W5QD
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