[Elecraft] The Chinese KX3

[Don Wilhelm]

I can give you some information about Elecraft product reliability based 
on my past experience.

I repair the Elecraft "legacy" transceivers - K1, K2 and KX1.  Based on 
serial numbers, there are about 13,000 of those transceivers out in the 
world.

I have repaired about 700 of those, and Gary Surrency (official Elecraft 
support) has repaired more than I have (but our numbers are close).  
There are some Builders for Hire that have repaired some too, and there 
is a service facility in Germany and in Italy and Japan that has handled 
some repairs too (I do not have their numbers), so you can add some 
"fudge factor" to account for those extra centers doing Elecraft repairs.

Considering that about 80 percent or more of those repairs are actually 
builders errors or owner induced conditions or the owner just wanted us 
to align and calibrate the transceiver, I would estimate that the true 
failure rate is about 2% -- and that is over the product life that we 
know about to date (12+ years for the K2).  We rarely see component 
failures that do not have an identifiable cause - in other words "it 
just failed for no known reason" is rare indeed.

If you run the MTBF numbers on those assemblies and compare them to the 
above numbers, I think you will see that the Elecraft transceivers are 
quite reliable.  That is consistent with my view of modern electronics, 
devices seldom fail, but when they do, Elecraft devices can be repaired 
- contrast that with your failed iPad or iPhone - plus a lot of 
(no-cost) phone and email support is available so you can "fix it 
yourself" at Elecraft.

If you have doubts about my numbers, you are invited to review my repair 
reports, but I would have to blank out the customer's identification 
first and round off the serial number so no customer could be identified.

73,
Don W3FPR

On 4/13/2012 1:28 PM, James Rodenkirch wrote:
> If Elecraft service is so damn good, tell me how reliable their product is?  Or are you talking about marketing/sales service vice product supportability service??
>
>