Granted, if I had to do the Rebel again, seeing that one of it's targets was for newcomers, e.g. non-hams, trying to entice some 8 year old at some Maker Faire to get into the hobby, maybe the two bands chosen didn't make sense, maybe it should have at least included 10, something techs could access immediately. But, in general, it was very good at getting kids and not so kids into the hobby. In fact, it helped get back hams who had given up on the hobby, it gave them something new to tinker with. Had MANY emails on both types of "new/returning" hams... ok, back to work, 73, KI4JPL John Henry
Just a general comment - on the up side it sure seems there is a LOT of technical talent among the group commenting here. My hat is off to you all! On the down side we've not all thought so much about how our words "feel" from the other person's point of view. I know we can do better on this. The small rewrite of the new policies is an example of what we can do - the message is exactly the same, but with an explanation pointing towards the shared goal of success the emotional side becomes that of a team between customer and company. Just as every good company wants to make their customer's results better, also every good customer wants a company that they have chosen to buy from to be a good successful company. Kind of missed a bit of the cup half full parts of this great news that TenTec wasn't killed off by RKR, rather it has a new owner with great prospects! Here I am going to venture to stick my neck out a bit: @ Mike N8WFF - Your business decisions need only to be clearly put to the customer, and you're not obligated to debate every detail of the background behind them. Example if the bench rate changes had been put out simply as the new rates and policy avoiding giving some of the reasons why things in this thread would have gone a bit easier. @ Steve K4YZ - With your experience and opinions your goal of influencing would have been better served by asking questions or making suggestions. Something like "Hey Mike, I'm seeing your minute by minute bill-out chart having a couple issues, but more importantly it comes across as kind of mean feeling. Might you consider something simpler and perhaps billing in 5 or 10 minute increments instead?" (I'm putting words into you mouth, sorry but I wanted to try and give an example of taking an observation from aggressive critique to coaching/influencing questions.) @ Bob KK5R, John KI4JPL and Myself - we got into stories when we had clear simple things to say. Bob, your love of the TenTec simple products is a take away that shouldn't get lost sandwiched in other dialogue, and perhaps with your languages and your electronics skills you might have a role in the TenTec future? John I hope you stay on team with Mike as you do an awesome job of getting information out. As for me, I have to remember that my stories are boring to others, and really don't have much more than the observation that we do better when we cooperate rather than bicker, we bring a whole lot more to the table. I'm impressed with the passions, intellect and skills in the others posting. Feeling pretty much out of my league as for the technical side or knowing the production/sales side of the industry - but then again I am WAY enthused that the TenTec line is now in good hands. The fire sale wind-down of TenTec has ended and a new TenTec is here. Well done, and wishing TenTec and each of you every success! I feel a lot more comfortable about having five TenTec radios in the family and look forward to adding more! Also I was unaware of the Prometheus amp and it definitely is on my radar. If any of the posters are going to be at Hamcation 2016 I'll buy the first beer! I'm doubtful for Dayton as I while I love the people there is so much dislike about the Hara and hotels there that I'm not planning on going. 73 Steve K9ZW
There is nothing wrong with charging reasonable fees for troubleshooting, parts and repairs, and packing and shipping. I don't see what all of the fuss is about just because the new company doesn't want to do it for free like the old company did. The old company went under, anyone want to guess why? So if your too cheap to pay for service and shipping then maybe you should learn how to fix it yourselves. I really don't like the way some shiny cracker jack extra with a vanity call Mr. Robeson, You are way out of line and I really think you owe Mike Dishop an apology. You made your point several pages ago but continue to insult and berate the man. Why would you do that? He is just trying to run a business and was good enough to share his thoughts and some of his new business practices with the ham community. I see that you don't own a Ten Tec or Dishtronix product so I have to wonder why you are so emotional over things that really have no impact on you or your life. I hope the moderators have something to say about this because you are becoming distressing.
Small kits with few parts are less difficult than some complicated "wind your own" kits. Vectronics is a guide here. They took some old circuits by the likes of Doug Demaw and streamlined them and, of course, they are in themselves streamlined in function but they give the taste of better things to come. The difference in the price of the Vectronics T/R unit compared to the MFJ Cub is about half and also simpler to build. The Cub has more capabilities and is more frequency agile but the Vectronics is a handful of parts that does provide the ability to make a few contacts. In the process, it refines operator skills but also gives a glimmer of much bigger and better things. If small kit builders get great pleasure from it, they are the ones to look over the offerings of other kits or built radios along with the peripherals. In this respect, the cost of kitting is offset by the advertising and by the continued interest in the hobby provided by Ten-Tec, etc. The benefit to Ten-Tec is that a satisfied customer is on the way to being a better customer with better equipment. The key to this is to provide links to [favorable] reviews of the equipment and a forum for discussion such as Yahoo Groups. But as an experiment, it might be interesting for Ten-Tec to offer a "nostalgic" radio like the Powermite that offers 40-20-15 Meters for a few months and see where that goes. I suspect it would pay for itself and, in the long run, get more customers for Ten-Tec. The publicity would also entice hams to go see what Ten-Tec offers on the website due to "word of key" by the QRPers. However, this is my idea but no doubt there are others with better ideas than the "lowly" Powermite. How about a more enhanced/sophisticated Pixie? Halted sells 'em for $15 and anyone can afford that. This would create interest in a cheap enclosure that would make it more appealing to some people and provide another source of income for enclosures. The kit could even be provided as a soldering training aid and the crystal/s and enclosure provided as options — this would make the basic kit even less expensive and more directed to users... Since we are in a hobby that has a stepping-stone foundation as one goes from Novice to Extra, the same evolution can be provided in range of equipment as one goes from simple to more complicated. Few hams go immediately to a $3000 radio. Even Boy Scouts could also be interested in a beginner's radio. You can see that I'm also thinking of the advertisement possibilities. Ten-Tec could be known for providing items of interest to all hams from the beginning on up. There are some companies that have only elite-class radios and this is not very inviting for some hams to go take a look at what all the company offers.
I'd like to make a brief comment on kits. As we all know electronic components have predominantly gone to surface mount. You end up paying a premium for through hole components as they have all the extra metal in the leads, etc. Typically leaded is used only for higher power applications. The surface mount components are supplied on tape wound on reels that go directly to the pick and place machine. There are typically 5000 resistors on a reel for example. The pick and place machine mounts everything without human intervention (usually). Believe it or not, the highest cost in the electronics business (for on shore manufacturing anyway) is the human labor. It is much cheaper to machine mount and solder a printed circuit board than it is to pay a person to manually crank out parts, count, bag and label them. If you buy a small quantity of parts through a distributer who has to do this process for you there is a brutal premium. For example, I just checked the price of a 10K, 5% 0805 resistor. On a reel of 5000 it costs 0.0019 or five for a penny. If you buy it in cut tape, the price for one is ten cents. So you buy the full reel for $9.60, or you buy them one at a time for $950 off of that reel. WOW! Does anyone ever buy just one? There are 96 standard values of resistors in the EIA range of values, so if you wanted to stock every single one on a reel you could do it for 921.60 !!!!! Conversely, the industry price to place a resistor like this ranges from 5 to 10 cents each, including the component! What a deal! You don't even need to invest in the equipment. You design the board, send it out, and a few days later it comes back. Of course I have greatly oversimplified things here, but I wanted to demonstrate that it is (at least according to my calculations) MUCH more expensive to produce a kit than a finished product. Then you have to add the labor cost for "free" technical support for people who can't get it to work correctly for whatever reason. When I was a young man, I built a HW8 and the GDO (Heathkit Grid DIP Oscillator, a ham tool of days gone by!) It was significantly cheaper to build the kit rather than to buy it assembled. I bought in kit form because I was a youngster without much money and wanted to get on the air badly. I passed a lot of papers for that $59 GDO kit, and it is still setting in a box in the back room somewhere today. Fortunately I've MUCH better tools now Sadly, it costs more to make a kit than a completed device. Therefore the only reasons to market a kit is for educational value or simply for the joy of building something. Are there really enough hams who would pay $500 to hand assemble the Rebel / Patriot for example? I do hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I would really need to see a LOT of people requesting a specific kit at a specific price before we could offer anything more. HOWEVER, we do have a little 80m receiver kit which is nice, and I have thought about perhaps kitting a run of these with ALL the components in it for the other bands, so you could buy it and build it for the band of your choice. It is a through hole kit, and the work is done. It even isn't a bad design for what it is - a single conversion superhetrodyne with crystal ladder filter for under $200! I can't see how we ever even made any money on that one! One of the things I am doing is reviewing each product design at the PCB level to get a very clear vision of what I have to work with. We might be able to do a simple multiband kit that is partially assembled like some other people do. We could surface mount the difficult parts and let you solder the wires, connectors and other through hole part together. I'm afraid the technical support would kill us though. I will be very interested to see how the new Heath Kit label fares. I, along with others, wish them every bit of luck. I don't see kits being a large part of Ten Tec's future at this time, but then again WE ARE YOUR COMPANY!!!! We WANT to provide what you want to buy. If enough of you get together and ask me for something, we will make it for you if it is financially possible to do so. I'm working really hard to be open, approachable and accessable so Ten Tec can really deliver the products you want. I'm sure I'm not doing a very good job of it. My 18 hour days are spent nose to the grindstone which means I don't always deal with things to everyone's satisfaction, but I really do try my best and I do give it everything I have. I am trying to be accessible as I can be, and yet still do my work. The last two weeks have been difficult, to say the least with hundreds of calls and email. Best 73 de N8WFF
Mike is right on several items. Kits are a blessing to those who can use them and learn from them and then provide word of mouth. TEN-TEC use to sell a LOT to different clubs who would use them in training sessions, sold them to be used at the Dayton hamvention for their kit building classes/demos. Yes, Boy Scout troops would be x number of them quite often, along with school classes, etc. It did promote TEN-TEC and the hobby in general They are a double edged sword though. I can't remember how many times I saw the kit service guy working on a kit that a customer had built that the customer could not get to work. The little 80m kit that Mike referred to is/was $124. I bet that price will go up, but, let's assume it stays at $124. Someone buys it for $124, and doesn't get it to work right, well, will they spend $140 in service to have the service guy look at it and estimate how long it will take to fix. Then, if it takes an additional 15-30 minutes to undo what was broken by the customer, and then fix it, well, do you think the customer will want to spend the 140 + 31.25 each 1/4 hour? I doubt it. This actually happened a lot, at the 2000 service rate, but I doubt many would send theirs in at today's service rate, leaving the kit to sit and never get it running. Of course, one has to define "kit". The Rebel is considered by some as a kit, it is a software hackers kit, and a hardware development persons kit. I have seen hardware shields/boards made up by other hams and sold to add functionality to it. Then of course all of the software changes made. I view this as today's kind of kits, because today more EEs have a LOT of software training, much more than they use to when I was young and traveling down the EE path. To some though it is not a kit because ya can't solder it together..... I myself (oops, there I go again, lol) I do understand that many hams still like to tinker with hardware and some also like to tinker with software, and, since it can be used as a teaching tool, I'd like to see kits continue, just need to find a realistic kit that can be made, that can provide education, and still be financially viable for a company to create. Who knows, if TEN-TEC sells 500 Orion 3's next year, then maybe that would subsidize service and kits to a point where TEN-TEC could provide 20 different forms of kits and sell them at an attractive rate without them having to make money on their own, the return would be on the good will. ok, 'nuff bs on this for me, kits will stay in the back of my mind as an item to think about when things get running smoothly. KK5R, very good discussion and very positive inputs.... 73, KI4JPL John Henry
This sounds interesting. I prefer 40M but actually haven't tried 80M all that much, especially for CW. Please give me a website address since the last time I went to the Ten-Tec site, it seemed to be "under construction" or limited. Maybe this has changed recently, however.
For KK5R and others. http://www.tentec.com/ This is the official COMPANY website for TEN-TEC, and for now, it is just an "announcement" page. As things get transitioned, and announcements are made, they will be done there. In the meantime. RKR Designs is permitting TEN-TEC to keep it's "stuff" there. So, go to http://www.rkrdesignsllc.com/ The transceiver kit Mike mentioned is at: http://www.rkrdesignsllc.com/products/transceivers-receivers/ scroll down, and there it is. Yes, this online approach is a kludge for now, but it is a way to still get to information, existing literature, firmware update files, drivers, TEN-TEC product info, etc. Eventually some day it will get moved over, but we are VERY thankful that RKR is graciously permitting it to remain there on their hosted website. Of note, there were other band kits available, this is the last one left that had sufficient parts in house to honor xx sales. Of course, values of different parts can be changed to make this 80m item a 40m or xxm. There were several in this 1300 line, 1340, etc. I see that the email address for sales is on the www.tentec.com website. sales at tentec dot com. 73, KI4JPL John Henry
When I worked in engineering at an Army Depot, they had machines that you placed a PC board into and it rand a complete check on it, automatically. There are certain test points that it looked at for this purpose. The diagnostics were used for either troubleshooting or for finding any fault/s. However... A machine that might cost $50,000 is not a wise investment when you only need it to check 5-10 boards a month. Better would be to encourage qualified hams to be a repair resource for such items. For a kitchen table repairman, although an excellent technician, could charge a flat rate for repairs/alignments and it would save Ten-Tec money and also give some house-bound hams some interesting income. YouKits had about a half-dozen hams at one time to assemble the kits they offered. For some buyers, this would be not only interesting but necessary when they lack the test equipment or expertise to do the work. At least one SDR receiver kit had the possibility of getting the kit assembled for those who want it done that way and know it was going to work. I suspect that if a query to a Yahoo Group was put out, there'd be a lot of volunteers to assemble and/or repair such kits. It's Idea Time in the 'Hood...
When creating new products, the TEN-TEC engineering team, or the factory technician team, whichever made more sense at the moment, would in about a week create a test fixture that would test the most important parts of the board. Sometimes this took a week to create, sometimes more, but it was necessary to give the factory line a bed of nails to place boards on to run specific tests. Then, we created some automated tests run by a PC to setup/test/etc not only the finished board, but also the finished unit. It talked GPIB to various test equipment as well, correlating a single setup press to set up the rig and the test equipment, hit a button to run a test, then boom the result was printed. Granted, not everything could be tested this way, but it worked quite well. The boards where it made sense to do a board level test would have some sort of test defined, be it with a box with a bed of nails, or just power and a SPI or IIC or serial control line, looking for output waveforms. There are also other much simpler ways to spot check boards, imagine a program on a PC that talks USB to a standard off the shelf digital camera, even a cheap $60 one will do for this, put a board in a fixture, take a picture, put the remaining unit under test boards in that same fixture, take another picture, do a color diff, and boom, 90% of SMD/etc issues can be found immediately by looking for color variances on a screen. Beats the heck out of buying a full blown factory vision system, and will work until a company is profitable enough to buy a full blown factory vision system. This method is EXTREMELY beneficial at even 5-10 boards a month, but, TEN-TEC is at least an order of magnitude greater than 5-10 a month (no, not cutting down your words, just using the example).... one order that they are working on is around 40 units, with at least 12 boards. So, the camera method is still good enough for this one, but still need some bed of nails tests to verify components, especially one's that have no visual way to see if they are inserted properly that even a full blown vision system won't pick out. Kudos, I do like the idea about posting for volunteers to assemble and/or repair kits, interesting. After all, some of our biggest competitors started out the same, meaning with volunteer efforts, not full blown engineer or technician salaries, and look at 'em now.... Thanks for the positive inputs, keep 'em comin', it can only make things better, as long as we all keep in mind "What matters most" in what we say and do, we will all benefit and proceed prosperously (there I go again, plagiarizing Philips... "Let's Make Things Better"... Franklin Covey "What Matters Most".... argh) 73, KI4JPL John Henry
Thanks for the website addresses. I see the 1380 and remember seeing it before. Thanks for the link. I know a guy at a local club that has the 1320 and sometimes missed club meetings because of it. I'm also glad to see the Eagle and Argonaut. I'm assuming that the Argonaut will be a continuing staple for Ten-Tec. In the early 1970's, I had one of the first Argonauts and remember it had the Collins R390 style rack-tuned RF stages and this was admirable. Mine had "jitter" in the tuning and at Dayton Hamvention, I mentioned it to the Ten-Tec guy and he sent me a new VFO. I expected a new slug and screw, not the VFO. And he said they did not want the old VFO back in Sevierville. By today's business standards and expenses, this would not be possible, perhaps, but it left a good taste in my mouth and causes me to say good things about Ten-Tec. And this happened decades ago. I'm sure that if I cracked the case on the new Argonauts, they would not be anything like the one I had. The one I had was full of electronics but with today's technology, I'm betting the interior is half the size of the old Argonaut and it has ten times better capabilities. All things considered, it's still a bargain.
I am very grateful that Mike has taken up Ten Tec into the future, and that John is doing what he can as well. Much appreciated. I am not much of a Ten Tec owner, or a rig owner in general, with having owned in the past a Century 22 and later an Argosy II, and now operating an Argo Scout, with a regular Scout available as a spare (turned down to QRP power, as I am a QRP operator on all my personal radios). All bought used. I am among those who will not be able to afford a new Ten Tec rig, but I will always keep my eye open for an affordable used opportunity when it might come along, such as either the Argo V or someday maybe an Argo VI or Eagle, but that is a ways off. But the confidence that for now Ten Tec is still around, and will repair these newer radios, has me certainly keeping these prospects in mind for eventual replacement radios in my life. Ten Tec always has been and still is my preferred rig source. Thank you! Cheers/73, Kevin, K9IUA
KK5R, just a personal note and hello, forgive me for HAVING to respond, but.... you haven't tried 80m all that much? Oh my GOSH!!!! Are you kidding me? 80m is the best band EVER!!!! 80m CW is a JOY!! I cut my teeth on 80m back in my novice days! We had 3700-3750 and the FCC raised the limit to 250W input... WOW, you couldn't find a spot ANYWHERE.... I was running a TR4C at the time, a 1977 Christmas gift from my Grandpa, WB8WES, rest his soul. It was all this activity with a WIDE 2.4KHZ receiver (Man I would have done anything for a narrow CW filter!!!)... that spawned my interest in high performance receiver design. Dynamic range was hardly even mentioned back then! I couldn't add a CW filter to that 9001.5 KHZ crazy IF scheme so I had to operate when everyone else was asleep or at work. I worked a schedule every day with Grandpa at 3PM before the band opened. I eventually sold the TR4C but eventually sold the radio for a filter rig but missed it ever since. I was telling that story one night on 3875 when one of the guys said there was a very pretty TR4CW/RIT on eBay with a buy it now about half the going rate and ... <click> it came home to me. I still fire it up in the winter when 80 is quiet and slide down under the old novice segment, listen and remember all those warm memories of spending time and hamming with granddad. His oldest brother, W8MEQ retired and was "tin canning it" -living in his travel trailer and touring the entire US as he pleased. With no cell phones and expensive long distance, our schedule every night on HF before the Wisconsin Net opened on 3892 was a daily event I digress though - you want to get on 80 and if you can stay awake till about 1-2AM work the grey line into Europe. The grey line means right before dawn and the atmosphere changes in such a way as to duct the signals right along the area ahead of the rising sun. I don't see it as prevalent on other bands, but then I don't operate much outside of 80m. Of course the greatest thing about 80m is to slide up at night and join a roundtable net. There are plenty of great guys with great conversation to keep you company at the bench while you are soldering. I soldered up most of my amp stuff while hanging on 3875, but everyone died or slid off to 160m unfortunately. Antennas are pretty easy and make everyone fairly on equal footing. An inverted Vee is great for NVIS and gives you about a 500 mile radius, while a dipole will get you coast to coast. My personal favorite is the 80m double bazooka. Put that up full length as high as you can get it, tune it and you will be happy! I can't guarantee 80m will be your thing, but then again you might fall in love with it as much as me! Oh, the BEST part of 80 for me now? Everyone running a KW to open on a winter night so you can crank the RF gain down to about 70% and listen to clear audio against a noiseless background and it sounds like everyone is in the room with you. I'm not an audiophile but I DO have a passion for good sounding rigs, and under my management I am going to do everything possible so that Ten Tec rigs do one thing - sound good! That is our advertising slogan if we have one: Buy a Ten Tec because it sounds good! Anyway, here is the good part - slide a narrow filter in and you can run CW at 100W and crank the RF gain down and it will just POP out of the background noise like nothing you can believe. Living north, 80m is the ONLY good thing about winter My favorite little handbook rig I built was an 80/20 superhetrodyne that used a 9 MHz IF and the 5MHz VFO - you put bodacious filtering in front of it to block the image. I bought the crystal filter for it in the flea market at Hamvention in 1976 - my first year there. Maybe we should build that again at TT. We could build our old PTO. I had a talk with Boyd about PTO's last night and the high cost of the machined parts... So you have 20m in the day when it is always open and 80m at night when it is open. What a concept. Those old time hams were pretty sharp! OK I'm going to go back to work now. Lunch is over. 73-Mike N8WFF
The TEN-TEC information on the RKR website is mainly there for reference for existing customers to get schematics, firmware updates, literature, manuals, etc. It is also a good reference for future customers. Mike is still going through what will be made and what won't, and scheduling them as to when and if to start an individual products production. So, there may be some items still on the RKR website that may not get produced for a while or unfortunately may even fall off the sales list completely. I know that the OMNI-VII and the Eagle have made the cut, the rest will be determined in time. Dont' take this as a negative against the Argo VI or anything, no, it is just that Mike is prioritizing the items required NOW, come February, he will add the xyz if feasible, then the pdq, etc. Time, again, it comes down to time, give 'em time, and hopefully in a year or two the portfolio will be such that TT is back on top of the market....
Well Bob, now that you mention it... Yes, it's quite annoying, especially on an iPad. At least with the alternative color scheme. On the other hand... And there's no nice way to say this without someone's feelings getting bruised... A good many of the posters who regularly use this font color, well, I've found that their comments (often rants) aren't worth the bother of trying to read. Sorry.
