[Elecraft] March/April NCJ

Wes wes_n7ws at triconet.org
Sat Mar 13 13:52:59 EST 2021


I bought a European made tri-band Yagi antenna from a friend who had never 
installed it. (I won't mention the manufacturer)  It was still in the unopened 
box after sitting in my friend's garage for some time.  The pieces of tubing 
were shipped inside each other (graduated metric sizes have a lot of clearance 
between sizes) and when I extracted them all I found two pieces for the same 
element were very corroded.  I used my household lye/vinegar method to clean 
them up and assembled the antenna. It worked fine and I decided to write an eHam 
review.

Based on the QC issue I rated it a four stars. I almost immediately got an email 
from the company in which I was accused of improperly storing the antenna and 
all sorts of other things.  It was also claimed that anything less that five 
stars would ruin their business, etc.  I sent photos of the tubing and heard 
back that this was impossible, it's never happened before and so on and so 
forth.  I got so much grief about this that I wrote the reviews people at eHam 
and asked them to pull my review, which they did.

Wes  N7WS

On 3/13/2021 10:37 AM, David Gilbert wrote:
>
> I agree that a preponderance of 5 ratings are from people congratulating 
> themselves on their choice, and the text often goes like
> "this is a fine rig" or "met all my expectations."
>
> And out of roughly 2,200 eHam ratings I once profiled just for grins, almost 
> all of the ratings of 1 star or 2 stars were for service or support issues ... 
> which tells you nothing about the rig itself.
>
> I also agree about the need to look for trends in the comments to find any 
> worthwhile insight ... which is why the NCJ article that used only the summary 
> average ratings is borderline useless to me.
>
> 73,
> Dave  AB7E 



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