Trials and Errors Issue 52: Editorial on Amateur Radio Market - Is it Viable for Suppliers?

This is the forum discussion for the article located at this link.

The amateur radio marketplace, worldwide, is a small place. Is it large enough to support sustained innovation, the same kind that other electronic devices see on a very regular basis?

Post your thoughts on this topic in the following discussion thread. Thanks for visiting! Dave, W7DGJ

 

A few thoughts:

- The amateur radio market has always been tiny. Most of the major rigmakers of the past had ham gear as a small part of a much larger business. Collins, Hallicrafters, National, Hammarlund, Heathkit, Yaesu, Icom, Trio/Kenwood, and others are examples.

- Many makers of amateur gear were in the business 20, 30, maybe 40 years.

- In the past, there were many similarities between amateur and commercial/military radio gear. National's HRO receivers were widely used by the Allies during WW2, and the Hallicrafters HT-4 transmitter was extensively modified to become the BC-610. Amateur VHF/UHF FM was derived from land mobile radio.

Not so much any more.

- Similarly, there was once a quite large SWL market for receivers. It's all but gone.

- Innovation takes many forms. The Big Thing now and for quite a while is SDR. Other innovations will have to play second fiddle for a while.

- The possibility of trade wars and tariffs doesn't help the situation.

- The presence of lots of good used gear is another factor.

----

The shutdown of MFJ should not be a surprise. Here's why:

- The founder/owner is 80 years old, and has earned his retirement many times over.

- MFJ was not doing well. The C19 pandemic hit them very hard and they never really recovered.

- The owner/founder could not find a buyer because he insisted on conditions of sale that made the company unsellable. The buyer had to buy the whole company, had to keep it in Starkville, and had to pay full price.

- Much of MFJ's product line was developed by predecessor companies that MFJ bought.

Full disclosure: I have been a licensed amateur for 57 years and have never owned anything made by MFJ. I couldn't afford their stuff.

Most of all, remember this:

Amateur Radio shouldn't be limited to just what manufacturers sell. We should be more than just plug-and-play appliance operators.

73 de Jim N2EY

 

It is definitely a challenge. The sales volume just isn't there. And then there's "behavioral" component.

1. Your comments about the reticence of the customer base I think are very much spot on. It has perplexed me for decades already how an avocation like amateur radio that is ostensibly a forward looking technical endeavor has so many participants that are to a large degree technology adverse. And/or they are so locked into a period of time from quite long ago. As I have said in a different thread, it is as if so many have decided to stick a stake in the ground at some arbitrary point in time and technology, and have then chained themselves to it. Then there is the deep rooted brand loyalty that is also so pervasive, so many simply will not consider a radio from another brand other than the one they have been loyal to for years, if not decades. And no amount of describing and showing them the capabilities and technological superiority of other choices already available will sway them. I see that play out over and over again.

2. Tied into that is a propensity to have learned amateur radio at some point in time, perhaps decades ago, and then not truly wanting to learn new things beyond that. The operational protocols and rituals tied to that from that time period get so permanently ingrained, and so much so that when new technologies do come along to warrant revisions to those operational protocols, it is sharply opposed and ridiculed. For example: "only real radios" have knobs, "the best way to find weak signals is slow tuning", "why would anyone want to multi-task across modes and bands?", "radio is ONLY meant to be heard, not seen".

So those two items above limit the market appeal of things that are actually innovative, and at the same time are off putting to younger people. We as a group have done it to ourselves for ever being appealing to younger generations with the incessant demands of legacy purity and rituals.

As for the "sell what we've got", yep see a lot of that too. It mostly goes back to brand loyalties, and issues both 1. and 2. above. It really is a feedback loop. The big 3 will build what their customers say that they want, but yet you will hear those same people also say that they are looking for technical innovation, but yet they won't actually buy it when it becomes available. Why? Because it almost always isn't their brand that is offering it for sale first, or even worse, it is from brands that are from the wrong country. The whole SDR history is an example of that. It's been around in a significant way for 25 years already. But to the mainstream brand loyalist, it has only been around since about 2015. Even though those mainstream brand's implementation of it was and is late, unimaginative, and woefully underwhelming.

Once again I have left specific brands out of this post. That is deliberate. The hope is those who are curious will do some digging, the info IS out there, but they really do need to look at all of the possible offerings, and do so with a cold, hard, and analytical approach. And to not be just looking for "validation" of their favorite brand or "how to use a radio" belief set while dismissing all other brands and/or usage approaches. Blind brand loyalty, and other brand antipathy, really needs to be tossed out the window. Until that happens, the amateur radio gear market space will continue to be pretty innovation and technology stagnant like it currently is.

 

Hey Duane, just a "thanks." That's an excellent post with a lot of comments that resonate with me. I think we've "done it to ourselves" to a great extent. One problem for me (I've been a brand loyalist for one company for years) is that the companies that have the "cool new" technology are sometimes risky feeling. You go to look at their reviews on eHam and there are people telling you that they paid a lot of money and it took 13 months to get it, or they called support a hundred times and got no reply for an issue. All of these things are symptomatic of young businesses without infrastructure to deal with customer service issues. When I see that, I naturally don't take the risk. I'm going to rethink what I buy and why and maybe take some of those "risks" in the future! Dave, W7DGJ

 

Hi Jim, thanks for the post. Yes, Martin was 80 when he made that decision. And I'm sure he's a fussy guy, guaranteed to be difficult to work with on something like this transaction. But I think that most companies could figure out a way to make it work if they were truly interested. That was a solid brand name -- had a bit of a quality issue on some products, but the name still held a lot of water. Of course, you're right about being more than appliance operators. But if we left the ham radio business to simply a bunch of parts suppliers, it wouldn't be something we could truly build on. Some newcomers could maybe be convinced, but when I'm considering jumping into a new hobby or a pastime that will cost me some serious change, I pour over the catalogs and the "gear" that you can buy ready-to-go is quite important to the decision. Dave, W7DGJ

 

There is always a degree of risk one must take when going with someone or something new, that's a given. But stagnating along with a longer established company carries its own kind of risk. And often that is the lack of innovation in their product line. They do that because they know a modest evolution of an existing design and concept is "safe" for reasons pointed out in my previous post. And it is also less expensive for them to develop mostly evolutionary new models, but make no mistake, the signs of them doing things to reduce cost of development is very much visible if you look for it. Some products by the big 3 take well over a year to see the light of day in production after being initially announced.

And also one must assess the risk of an amateur radio division / product line of a large company that you can find no mention whatsoever of amateur radio in their financial reports. Or a company where a large part of their business is indeed amateur radio, but is also a company that has competitive pressures within their somewhat limited scope of various non amateur product lines. Or another company which is privately held, but their financials are very opaque. So in that regard are they really that different than the newer upstarts, especially the ones that aren't actually that new anymore?

 

An historical point......

SSB was known in theory in the 19-teens and was first put to use in radio in the late 1920s for the first transatlantic telephone service. A handful of pioneering amateurs built SSB transmitters in the 1930s and put them on the air, but few followed their lead. After WW2, SSB became more popular in amateur radio, with the first SSB construction articles appearing in the late 1940s and the first manufactured and kit SSB gear appearing in the early 1950s.

Yet, amateurs were slow to adopt the new mode, despite the 'phone bands being VERY crowded and full of heterodynes during popular operating hours. AM was still the most popular voice mode on the HF amateur bands well into the early 1960s. There were complaints that "the ARRL is shoving SSB down our throats" and "I don't want to sound like Donald Duck" and such.

This slow adoption of new technology (which was hardly "new" by 1962) was one reason FCC pushed the "incentive licensing" idea. They saw the amateurs of 60+ years ago as not being innovative and forward-looking (particularly in comparison with their Soviet counterparts).

The reality was that SSB gear was complex, expensive, and more difficult to operate than AM gear. Transmitters and receivers that were perfectly adequate for AM were all but useless on SSB due to the need for much greater stability, linear amplification, etc. And if SSB caught on, enormous amounts of AM gear would lose value or even become worthless.

On top of that, many if not most amateurs then (and now) were hobbyists with a relatively-limited understanding of radio theory. They wanted radios that WORKED, not science projects. AM was easy to understand and implement, while SSB required a lot more understanding - particularly things like the phasing method of SSB generation, and the operation of linear RF power amplifiers.

What turned the tide was the development of SSB transceivers and matched-pair transmitters and receivers that made SSB operation easy and simple, were smaller, lighter and which cost LESS than the equivalent AM gear. By the late 1960s, SSB was the dominant HF voice mode. By the 1970s, separate transmitter/receiver pairs were pretty much gone - and you could buy AM gear for almost nothing.

IOW, none of what's being discussed is new, and the causes for it are many.

73 de Jim, N2EY

 

Hello, and you're welcome!

I disagree. From what I have read, Martin's terms were set in stone, and he would NOT change them. He wouldn't sell off parts of the company, wouldn't allow it to be moved out of Starkville, wouldn't bend on the price.

There are deals that just won't work.

It's a well-known brand name, but its reputation is....mixed. As in "some swear by it, while others swear at it."

And note this: MFJ was a MAJOR advertiser in QST, yet, within a few months of MFJ stopping their ads, QST had the same number of ad pages - just from different advertisers.

We still have many manufacturers, and kit makers.

And Southgate Radio is doing OK.

73 de Jim, N2EY

 

One thing overlooked in this discussion of going from AM to SSB was how SWLs with relatively cheap gear could no longer listen to hams. It was one way we attracted new hams.
Another thing is that for many, ham radio is like flying a biplane, driving a Model A, or hunting with a black powder rifle. It is not a desire to be cutting edge, it is a form of historical reenactment. If we REALLY wanted to be cutting edge we would all be doing data over satellites. The post WW II ham radio boom was nothing to do with cutting edge, it was all about using old cheap surplus radios.

 

That was actually mentioned in a QST editorial in the mid-1960s discussing the then-recent drop in the number of newcomers and the reasons for the drop. Another factor was the then-recent change in the "Conditional distance" from 75 to 175 miles, which made almost all of the 48 CONUS states "go to the FCC office" territory.

Pretty much. Or by a network of short-range digital RF links to a fiber network.

The post WW2 ham radio boom was about a lot of things besides "using old cheap surplus radios". Surplus was just one piece of a very big pie. And there WERE hams who were all about "cutting edge" back then, doing EME, tropo scatter, meteor scatter, SSB, ATV, RTTY, SSTV, transistors, and more. But again, they were one piece of a very big pie.

Consider that 1961 saw the launch of OSCAR 1, the first nongovernment earth satellite, less than 4 years after Sputnik 1.

73 de Jim, N2EY

 

"Ham radio" is a hobby.

A hobby pursued on a very limited budget for most. IOW, ham radio has to compete with food, shelter, insurance and a host of other 'cost of living ' expenses.

A common complaint is that hams are 'cheap'. Many are - to the point of stupidity. Most are simply looking to manage their scarce 'recreational' dollars.

Given the limited market, cost constraints for any buyers, it is a tough market. Yet, I see new SDR QRP rigs for $149 USD. In the last couple of years large numbers of 'inexpensive' QRP rigs have hit the market.

For the folks peddling 5K super-duper radios, good luck. They will get some sales, but not a whole lot.
***
Another aspect of low sales numbers is radio equipment parts - using custom chips, many rigs are at EOL when they roll off the line to get sold. Add in backward compatibility issues and the market narrows even more. IMO, many of the rigs on the market today should have the classic "NO user serviceable parts inside" stickers seen elsewhere.
Lack of technical data, troubleshooting guides and the rest simply don't exist - mostly because they cost real money, something many in the (Asian) market choose to skip.

Given the weak US economy, an rapidly increasing cost of living worldwide and other factors, the outlook for new ultra-high-tech rigs is bleak, at best.

I believe we will continue to see real progress and new tech hitting the QRP market sub-set, but past that, many choose to ignore what little seems to dribble onto the market. This mostly to co$t.

 

Another good one, Dave!

The ham market is changing, splintering into niche areas that are all still part of the hobby. There are many more choices in radios and accessories. The small "mom and pop" shops are gaining share, while the big three are slowly losing it. I don't think any of the big three look at ham radio as their main business. They also have commercial products to pay the bills and keep the lights on. So they move slower and tend to follow the trends instead of lead them. Once they do have a winner, they squeeze all the life they can out of it, making minor upgrades just to have something new.

The upstarts, Elecraft and Flex radio are looking to make it on their premium products, selling fewer units, but making more from each one. They have to be putting out new, state of the art stuff to make the price worth it. Status is their product.

As Don said, the real innovation seems to be coming from the small QRP manufacturers. LNR, Xiegu, QRP Labs, HF Signals, Zachtek, Ham Gadgets, Venus/Itech. And there is a lot of innovation happening! But, you have to put up with the new business model. Sometimes preordering to cover the next batch or waiting while new product becomes available. There's no dealer carrying these products. Production goes off the rails if one of the team is out of action. Most advertising is through online ads on the forums or mentions by the influencers. Customer service is online because the owner is still working his day job while trying to make a go of it.

I think we will see more companies like this, selling cheaper radios in a different way to hams that can't justify high-priced rigs. Fewer people hamming at home due to rules or interference requires lighter, cheaper radios that you're less likely to cry over if they break. But you'll still have the Elecrafts and IC-705s if you can afford them. And I think these small companies will come and go at a much faster pace than we're used to. There won't be very many fifty year old radio companies.

How is that new zBitx from HF signals even possible at that price?! We live in amazing times.

 

All true, we were always home to experimenters trying new things as well. On the cheaper end, a large part of ham literature from back then seemed to deal with either surplus radios or "junk box" radios. I got the impression that a ham from say the 1950s to at least 1970-something was expected to be able to come up with at least a novice CW transmitter from parts found scavenging cast off TV sets. I recall that as a young lad with $20 from lawn duty and a wagon I could circulate around garage sales and come home with some decent old tube radios. I once got a really nice Hammerlund for maybe $15 that was in what looked like new condition and it worked perfectly.
Now of course the world of SDRs and cheap used computers is the equivalent way in for a kid and old tube radios are liable to be expensive or needing a lot of work.

 

Agree 100%.

This is something that is almost completely lost by almost every commenter to threads where someone asks how to help "a kid" get started in amateur radio today. Without fail, they will give advice to go round up a very vintage radio like what the commenter themselves had used 3, 4, 5 decades ago. Nope, the world has moved on long ago. Can only imagine how many youngsters get turn off of amateur radio by that recommendation.

Edit to add:

I view the cheap RTL dongles available today as being the equivalent of receivers like the Knight-Kit Ocean Hopper and similar were back in the 1960's.

 

What happened with MFJ isn't a new phenomenon, and it isn't a Ham Radio related issue either, but manufacturing in general.

I've worked in electronics all my life, and have seen many booms and busts in the industry in general. I also, sadly, watched the entire US electronics industry fail. Household names; RCA, Emmerson, Philco, Magnavox, Etc... ALL gone or purchased for just the Brand Name by a Chinese company.
Even Zenith who ended up buying Heathkit, eventually failed due to foreign competition. It's a ruthless business world out there.

I wouldn't get too hung up on the stagnant technology, at least the companies that are making equipment still make it.
There was a time when either we built our own equipment, or got hold of some surplus junk and adapted it. There has been and will always be the Entrepreneur; these are the folks who tend to do the innovating.

At almost 65 I have seen advancements unheard of when I was born, and god willing will see more.
But I can't help but believe the time is quickly approaching where we can not repair what we have manufactured it because we no longer understand how it works.