MFJ closing down manufacturing facilities effective May 17th 2024

I wish him the best, also.

I met Martin at the Dayton Hamvention in 1973 when he was personally staffing the MFJ booth along with a few others.

When I heard him speak with a southern drawl, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

Nice guy, wish him all the best.

 

Just wish the HyGain rotors had survived.

 

Can't tell you how many times I looked at the same MFJ catalog.

Over and over. Even when I was trying to become a ham. Not even after.

It was filled with fantastic ideas and curious things.

 

????? Please explain, thank you

 

They told me not to. But I will say it is difficult to sustain an equipment industry when a lot of folks only buy $50 HTs.

 

Except for the coffee cups!

 

I can’t believe how naive some people can be about purchasing a company like this. No one on this forum knows the status of the company.
When is the last time it showed a profit?
Are there any unpaid taxes?
Is there any pending litigation against it?
Are there any outstanding loans?
How does the gross income for the past five years compare to the prior five years?
Etc, etc, etc.

Unless you can prove you have the financial resources to swing the deal and you’re willing to hire a team of lawyers and accountants, you’ll never know.

 

TRUE
One of the better products and companies that they acquired over the years, with a rich history.

 

I think the last HT I bought was about $18 and I could probably get three of those for $50. Portable radios are simply not high dollar devices in 2024. I paid about $50 for an HT perhaps 12 years ago. Nowadays $20 is too much.

They will be part of amateur radio life for a long time to come. If you hear me loud and proud on the bands, it's almost certainly through an MFJ or Cushcraft antenna, and sometimes through an Ameritron amplifier or an MFJ tuner. I expect these products will still be running strong 50 years from now when I'm dead and gone. MFJ probably will live on anyway, but even if it doesn't, its products will far outlive the companies, just like many of the names dropped in this thread.

 

This is worth reading from W8JI:
I'm going to write something that says as much as I think is proper to say. Ham radio is a very tough business. Most Hams are generally cheap, the bulk are not technical and post-1950 (maybe) most (not all) have been less and less technical. Internet has trained people to talk and find what they want to hear instead of think and learn.
MFJ was not making money since at least 2017, so let's be rational adults not blame this on politics or on personal disagreements. I watched Swan, Johnson, B&W, Collins, Drake, Dentron, Heathkit, Amp Supply, Vectronics, Viewstar, Ten-Tec, and a dozen others go out of business.
RCA went out of the tube business, so did GE, Cetron, and many others. Eimac dropped the glass power grid tubes in the 1990s.
Any business failure is simply because the business model cannot make a profit, and that is always a result of operating costs exceeding income. Those operating costs are never determined by a political party or customers. They are determined by how a business is run and what the market is.
MFJ has been quietly for sale for a while now, but the Ham radio business is very tough. One return for a loose screw can kill the profit on selling that product, that is how little the margin is. MFJ was run in one of our poorest states where operating expenses are the least, it had a some good operating practices (like making its own sheet metal) and like any business some very foolish ones (like not having enough QC, which is what killed Dentron).
Getting something balanced in a low-profit business is just incredibly tough. Any manager has a different opinion of that proper balance point, and often times it cannot be balanced.
We cannot reasonably expect 1980s products to be patched along without eventually reaching end of life. The cost of parts has also been increasing, the worst jump on tubes and stuff was around 1990 forward. Let's stop making up nonsense and just realize Ham radio is a tough business and places have for years and years been going out of business.
I expect Gigaparts to be the place that picks up all of the viable products from MFJ. Steven Pan was with MFJ from the day it started until he left a few years ago. Pan was the president and the linchpin of MFJ. If there was one single driving force behind MFJs positive parts, it was Pan. He was the glue that held it together.
Pan is helping Gigaparts since he left MFJ. They have a pot of gold with him. I fully expect Gigaparts to be a new and much improved source of MFJ-like products with higher quality.

 

At one point QST was "subsidized" by ad revenue from major industrial corporations, like RCA, GE, Sylvania, Westinghouse, Raytheon, Eimac, Collins, Cornell-Dublier, Phelps-Dodge, etc. They're not coming back. Even still, none of these purchased more ad space per issue than MFJ. Puts the ARRL in a tough spot.[/QUOTE]

When I was a member of a west coast ham radio club a couple years ago before my relocation/retirement as I would scan the room one thing was immediately apparent. There are very few young people going into amateur radio.
I am not sure how any hobby can survive long term with the lack of new operators joining in and buying new equipment.
I gave up rc aircraft recently which also has a lack of young people involved.

 

MFJ was like the old Sears Roebuck or Sears mail order catalogs. Something for everyone. I bought a bunch of their things over the years which were a boon to my hobby. Not always the best constructed.

On the negative side, I suspect that sometimes a very small USA company was formed to sell just one or two self-invented and unique products, but MFJ would jump on the design and come out with its own perhaps less expensive version of the product, and of course, it would be more highly advertised (monthly!). This could put the original company out of business, or lower revenue considerably.

Also, on the negative side, I think that QST and ARRL gave MFJ more product reviews due to all the ad revenue. One time I approached QST about doing an article about one of the founders of a very well-known American ham manufacturer, and QST turned the idea down, saying something about not wanting to show companies any favoritism. And yet, QST went ahead and did at least one very favorable article about Martin Jue and the history of MFJ. I wasn't surprised. I had written a number of prior published QST articles.

QST will never be the same again. I liked it when MFJ began selling some of the individual parts used in some of its products. When I was building my first deccent-quality loop antenna, I bought one of their large, variable butterfly capacitors to use with it, although I did decide to have the outer blades all aluminum soldered together to improve conductivity.

I wonder why MFJ was buying all those subsidiary companies in recent years (Cushcraft, etc.). I suppose this was before the pandemic, and Jue had plenty of money to build the company further, and those companies could be bought fairly cheaply? Sometimes, it seems that when companies get too big they start to loose the sense of their mission, start to lose control of all the far-flung operations, start to lose sight of their customer base, and become unduly optimistic about future sales. Hey, Boeing is that way now !! Amazon will probably eventually go that way.

Seeing MFJ go is like seeing Heathkit go. I was using the original Heath AT-1 back in the day, and I built a big bunch of their test equipment for my dad's TV repair shop. Where did Heathkit go bad? I still prefer to build all my stuff from a kit if possible. But now nearly all of the Elecraft products are manufactured.

Interesting to read that getting parts to produce ham gear is getting more difficult. I remember trying to buy a couple MFJ products back several years ago, only to find they were on backorder, On backorder for months and months.

I'll have to tell my ham friend in Germany, Gottfried, DL2MFJ.

bil KD6JUI / MM

 

I would not exactly agree the cited above. As an example, I've got Ameritron AWM-35BH SWR/Power meter that perfectly fits my low-power needs (since one single 4CX800A is not QRO yet). This is not a kit but finished item, don't you? Meanwhile, its [pretty important for me] Peak/AVG switch failed almost instantly. I'm overseas, sending the meter back to MFJ will make it golden so what could be simpler than replacing the switch by myself? Whatever else could, I can say, but not that damn switch. I asked MFJ for a replacement to buy from them since one-cent generic switch would not necessarily fit aesthetically while I sincerely wanted to preserve look as well as functionality of the meter, but MFJ have never answered and just closed my ticket with no clear solution. So small thing makes so big disappointment towards entire MFJ however I still in love with Hy-Gain HF antennas.

 

I would not deny that there are a lot of question marks over the wisdom of purchasing it - my surprise is that Martin seems to be happy to turn down offers for it that have apparently been made. It may well be that the offers that have been made are lower than the value he attaches to the company, but he is apparently proposing to simply terminate all operations and lock the doors - unless he owns a significant amount of prime real estate that the buildings are sitting on, he seems likely to come out of the process with nothing rather than a sum of money that might be smaller than he hoped but is still non-zero.

I've seen suggestions that he has rejected offers because they did not commit to leaving production in its current location. If this is an attempt to protect the jobs of his employees and the local economy, then it is very laudable - provided he has an alternative plan that does not involve completely closing the company. If things proceed as is currently being suggested here, then the only outcome would seem to be that Martin will miss out on a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a new boat and America will lose several dozens of jobs to China...

Martin (G8FXC)

 

What a downgrade!

From real thing to nothing in fact.

Well, it depends. Texting to a guy pretty far past the fence may be more efficient than yelling loud while a kind of small talk would, I'm sure, still better goes over the fence.

Yep, right. Solid state amps do not waste energy on cathode heating, require no tuning, and instantly ready to work but still vulnerable to overdrive and static discharge. Multipoint fuel injection is not only matter of ecology itself but lets the fuel burn more efficient thus improves performance overall while better ecology is just a [desired] consequence. The only thing I cannot get is that why there is no place for ham radio in the cars nowadays? Things have changed a lot, you're just right, but why the cars became so radio-unfriendly?