[Elecraft] Elecraft Service

[Steve Masticola]

Tim N9PUZ has an excellent point. Manufacturers of any long-lived electronic equipment have a neverending battle with component obsolescence. Say an FPGA goes end-of-life and there is no pin-compatible part. This is a problem that I have had professional experience with -- and which AFAIK has no good solution without taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in engineering costs. In another instance, a jellybean processor was declared end-of-life and the entire product line (dozens of products) had to be redesigned to keep it manufacturable. I doubt that Elecraft (or Flex, for that matter) has the funds for a lot of that sort of workaround.
It's possible to take some engineering measures against component obsolescence, e.g. to design with multiple-source components.