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TEN-TEC Announcement January 4, 2016

Discussion in 'Amateur Radio News' started by KI4JPL, Jan 4, 2016.

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  1. K9ZW

    K9ZW QRZ Lifetime Member #262 Platinum Subscriber Life Member QRZ Page

    Wishing you every success Mike!

    Without the evaluation of data I do not have it is impossible to offer valid suggestions.

    Might be worth pulling some of the positive suggestions as part of your action list though.

    I particularly find appealing your vigor in commitment to success!

    Quick observations from the thread that from my vantage look actionable with high benefits are:

    • Continuing the Information Flow to the marketplace. John Henry is doing a great job helping you on this.
    • Establishing your policies - whether the repair policy, new warranty length or whatever - and moving on to more important tasks. No gain in revisiting policies in public.
    • The focus on having completed product to ship along with the support of a repair capability that meets the product warranty needs - this has to be primary. Without new product for sale your dreams will be hard to achieve and the TenTec as a viable brand is less certain each month no product is available.
    • Hot on the heels is the out-of-warranty repair capacity as the secondary priority. There has been little or no effective bench repairs for quite some time, and yet the brand TenTec survived its unavailability and price point. It can survive a bit longer without.
    • Consider what legacy support information could either be releasable for public use, or perhaps licensed to a couple designated repair technicians, or any other novel way you can avoid losing time supporting legacy product. Harvest the good will while avoiding the time/resource drain by providing a different way for this support to be handled.
    • Put to a advisement structure that you can manage the "What might the next TenTec product(s) be?" question to let some marketplace influences help guide & prioritize the next products and hopefully provide an initial customer base who will monetize their intellectual/emotional involvement by ordering the products they help develop.

    All sounds simple, but just those six observations contain a huge amount of work to be done.

    Again as I don't have the data you are working with, I could be all wet, but I did want you to know that plenty of the ham community want to see you succeed and wish you the best!

    73

    Steve K9ZW

    http://k9zw.wordpress.com
     
  2. N8WFF

    N8WFF Ham Member QRZ Page

    John's comments above about the service department are spot on. Listen people to what he is telling you! This is straight from a TenTec insider who has seen it all and has a good idea of what needs to change to make the business successful. Look at it this way - if you sold 1ooo radios a month you could subsidize the service department. But if something changes can you do that with 100 radios a month? or 10? or none? At some point the line you have to do what you need to do.

    Let me clarify something: It takes one hour to look at the unit and return it without repair is 140. If the tech repairs the unit in that hour it is still $140. If it goes a second hour it is $265.

    Let me make it more obvious: The first service hour is $140. Additional service hours are $125. There is a minimum charge for ANY radio sent in of one service hour, regardless of if we repair it or return it to you unrepaired.

    You can always buy a new radio. Buy a new one every year and then sell the old one and you will NEVER have to worry about being charged for service.
     
    K8ZFJ likes this.
  3. WA6KCJ

    WA6KCJ Ham Member QRZ Page

    I've always enjoyed my Jupiter. I knew they had good support. Obviously those days are over. It's also obvious to me that TenTec radios belong in the past. I own Heathkit, Drake, Galaxy, and Collins radios. And now, I add one more to my classic radios ... my TenTec Jupiter. Yes, it makes me sad.
     
  4. WD5JOY

    WD5JOY Ham Member QRZ Page

    Policy of the past cannot be policy of the future; no matter the consequences. Equipment under warranty should be treated as such, however, if 'liabilities" were not included in the purchase it seems that honoring a warranty of the former owner will be more of a moral decision than a business decision.

    Other companies in related as well as unrelated fields have often agreed to perform warranty service for a SPECIFIED PERIOD OF TIME after which repair would only be done on a 'cost per hour basis'. It may not have been the ideal solution, but it was far better than having a three month old item that started with a one or two year warranty that suddenly has NONE. The former owner might well have saved a significant amount of money by agreeing to a 'no liability' sale, yet the customer is the real loser who has no recourse.

    I have no idea if after all the dust settles the new owner will treat customers as if they are 'valued', yet logic tells me if they do NOT the customer base would be instantly decreased and new customers difficult to find. If 'logic' prevails I see the 'new' TenTech as choosing to INITIALLY value OLD customers MORE than potential NEW customers. Word of mouth being what it is today the OLD generates NEW or it destroys the entire operation. WHY would anyone buy a company knowing that in order to make it viable again they would need to dismiss the OLD and hope they can attract a sufficient number of NEW to survive? I TRUST the decision will be to take care of EVERYONE and build the reputation on a positive footing.

    Closing on the idea that ANY company would establish a policy of charging for 'telephone support' beyond the most basic of issues, especially OUT OF WARRANTY issues seems quite FAIR and LOGICAL; or as noted above, "Policy of the past cannot be policy of the future; no matter the consequences."

    Likely I'll be told I am full of "crap" and it is likely I am! Yet, full of "crap" or not I do know with certainty that when folks think they can get help for FREE it is much easier to call and abuse the ability than to at least TRY and eliminate other factors as the cause of their 'problem'.

    Senile Old Man 'Me' - 73
     
    K8ZFJ likes this.
  5. W1BR

    W1BR Ham Member QRZ Page

    I'm not sure the support is gone, since the service shop is still going forward, but charging a rate that will allow the company to make some profit.

    I'd agree with the gentleman who stated that more information needs to be released for the legacy radios. Board pictorials and parts lists for at the least the radios that used boards with surface mount parts. There are a few great Ten Tec forums where folks can go to get advice on servicing their older rigs.

    Pete
     
  6. W5EN

    W5EN Ham Member QRZ Page

    KI4JPL, PLEASE stop using the crutch phrase "I myself". Either I, or me are much better choices, such as you did use in the second line of your most recent post. In fact there is no real need for I, me, or myself. As the author it is safe to assume that insights come from your prospective unless specifically noted otherwise. Using both first and third person in the same sentence does not strengthen your argument.
     
  7. N8MSA

    N8MSA Ham Member QRZ Page

    I've worked in the automotive electronics business for twenty years, and those of you that haven't worked in electronics have no idea how hard it has been for Ten-Tec to stay competitive. Icom, Yaesu, Flex Radio and, to a lesser extent, Kenwood, reuse significant portions of their products across multiple domains. Icom, for example, will use an HF deck (PA, mixers, filters, etc.) across commercial, government, marine and amateur domains; this gives them an order of magnitude more volume to recover engineering and manufacturing costs than companies such as Ten-Tec with limited non-amateur volume. That they managed to stay competitive for as long as they did is, in business terms, a minor miracle and is a tribute to the clever engineering that made Ten-Tec products so much fun.

    Making Ten-Tec competitive will require careful cost management, and providing 'concierge' service - with a hundredth of the volume of a company such as Icom - is huge challenge. I would implore the new owners of Ten-Tec to look to Elecraft as a model for a lean, yet effective, support and service organization; they manage to provide 'best-in-class' service with many of the same constraints that the new Ten-Tec management organization is going to face.

    I wish the new owner(s) the best, and look forward to new products to try!
     
  8. KI4JPL

    KI4JPL Ham Member QRZ Page

    W5EN, appreciate the inputs.... Sometimes I rattle/type faster than I can logically think/cypher... The Jethro in me, lol. Honestly appreciate it though.

    Others, I agree, more info on legacy products should be publicized, schematics, board layout pictures, etc. but, when time permits.
     
  9. KY5U

    KY5U Ham Member QRZ Page

    That is what some of us are looking for, those who don't know John Henry from John Travolta want to know he speaks for you. And I'll say again I agree with the charges for service. The freebee ham and the guy who wants to sit around your shop and socialize so he can brag about his "contacts" at TenTec on the air can kill you.
     
  10. K4TAX

    K4TAX Premium Subscriber QRZ Page

    Yes true. And John is correct about e-mails and technical consultation. It is fact and I see the numbers with which I handle dealing with technical matters for many older and current Tentec products. And all of this is Free Of Charge on my part. Mind you, I'm not complaining as I do enjoy my hobby and have the resources, meaning a CD ROM full of manuals. Plus I own a rather extensive facility of test equipment that would in today's dollars, purchase a nice house. {my wife thinks I'm crazy when she sees the inventory list}

    Tentec has built some excellent performing equipment in the past and has continued to do so with current models. As one stated earlier, the "July Mega Sale" likely moved equipment out at cost or below cost prices. Don't be at all surprised if the current products return to original pricing or maybe more. These products are not designed to compete performance wise with the <$1000 JA radios or even those of "like pricing" on the market today. The receiver performance of my Eagle, side by side on air results, matches that of my K3S. In fact the NB in the Eagle is superior to both of those implementations as found in the K3S.
     
  11. K1MGY

    K1MGY Ham Member QRZ Page

    I'm not a customer, but was curious about this, and actually a bit stunned. Any attorneys in the crowd here who might care to offer some contract law?

    My guess is that an argument may be offered as to the circumstances of the old company and new company. Was it was sold, closed without being sold, or abandoned? Let's say there was a transfer of assets or reorganization (which is most probable). In this case, I should think a new owner must assume the existing liabilities, particularly customer equipment and the rules in force when the customer sent their gear for repair. If a reorganization, any Court would be incompetent (could happen!) if not accounting for the existing customers.

    /K1MGY
     
  12. KI4JPL

    KI4JPL Ham Member QRZ Page

    KY5U, to give you (and others that don't know me from Travolta, lol) a bit of info on "John Henry"

    Prior to TEN-TEC I was at Philips for many years, first as a software developer, then software project leader (managing from 5 developers in house to co-managing across multiple regions as many as 300 software developers), roles included standards committee interface for Philips with national committees such as the NTIA for the US at NAB and others. Drafted several report and orders for the TV industry, e.g. the requirements for TV manufacturers for Closed Captioning for ATSC, etc. etc. I was a member of Philips global software architecture team working on defining the architecture for the next generation television control systems and other products associated with those control systems usages. Worked with Eindhoven, Singapore, India, etc.

    I was hired on at TEN-TEC in 2005 to do the software for the OMNI-VII. That is also when I went for and received my technician license. I wrote the OMNI-VII firmware from the ground up (using some of the Orion's code for the DSP processing at the time), using the Jupiter as sort of a guide (code wise and feature wise, the Jupiter was my requirements specification, along with the hardware data sheets). I wrote the remote control application OnePlug to control the rig remotely via the Ethernet. Made the OnePlug project open source so that other really serious PC developers could take it and use it's code in their own CAT programs. This was very successful for some. And with the last release almost all of the customers using the Ethernet interface via OnePlug or N4PY or others that adopted the interface, customers were extremely happy, reports of "they don't even know I'm remote", long before there was a remoterig, all built into the OMNI-VII. I played a part in all of the amateur rigs after the OMNI-VII, and several commercial receivers as well.
    Worked my way to Engineering Manager, which was nothing more than being an interface between the real engineers and the rest of the company, call me a buffer, scheduling with them what was requested by Jack/Jim/etc. Running interference sort of between engineering and service/factory, handling questions as they came up, then delegating to the experts in engineering when I couldn't answer. A good manager doesn't need to know everything, but needs to rely on people who do, and in my opinion, TEN-TEC has and had some of the best at what they do, in ALL departments. And I've been at many larger corporations, Martin Marietta (at the time), Philips, Honeywell....
    Eventually, after Jack (original TT owner/President after Al) left, and then Jim (President after Jack) left, I also took on the role of the senior manager in the Sevierville facility for RFC and RKR. Ran most local stuff, bowing to the owners and President of the day for what actually got worked on in engineering, production priorities, problem handling, personnel handling, etc.
    All during this time, from 2005 onwards, I was still spending most of my time (other than handling the megasale fallout which actually had lasting effects until the day I left) writing software. I'm a software developer, I love to make things work. I'm the guy whose truck you would see at TEN-TEC sometimes on the weekends because I wanted the xyz feature to work better, or I needed to review scheduling coming up for pdq.
    I was not very happy with RKR for reasons I will not discuss, so in June of 2o15 I left.
    Now, I'm doing anything I can to assist Dishop to get TT back up and going.
    The true people to thank in all of this though is Dishop and the current employees who decided to remain at TT after all of this, imagine going through multiple owner changes, multiple ways of doing things, a lot of which simply did not work, time after time, changing direction on... well, won't go any further there, but I don't blame some for leaving, even a couple that had been there 40 years....
    John Travolta, no, never could dance like he did in Saturday Night Fever, oh well.....
     
    N6YW likes this.
  13. KI4JPL

    KI4JPL Ham Member QRZ Page

    For others reference, Bob, K4TAX is one of the hams on the yahoo forums and the contesting.com reflector that usually pipes up with suggestions, questions, etc. when people have issues with their units. A LOT of the time those guys can diagnose your issue there because they have knowledge of those units in thousands of different setups/shacks. Granted, sometimes TEN-TEC service and these guys may butt heads, have differing opinions on what is "correct", but, usually the end goal was the same, a customer who had an issue now no longer has the issue or understands something a bit better, and in the long run, doing the analysis on the forum does give others the same information for when they see the same or similar things.....
     
  14. NR7N

    NR7N Ham Member QRZ Page

    Paul Clinton?
     
  15. KI4JPL

    KI4JPL Ham Member QRZ Page

    Paul Clinton, he is an extremely valuable asset and I do consider him a very valued friend of mine.
    But I can't discuss individual people's status whether they are employees, contractors, or have decided to leave, or are on temp leave or are.....
     

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