In article lq9Pb.25785$Xq2.14841@fed1read07, "K7JEB"
writes:

Leo wrote:

That makes more sense to me, Alun - I don't see why the ARRL would
propose moving almost 400,000 people to a higher licence class just
because the ITU made morse code testing optional.

You can thank BPL for that. If we can't lick them on the
egress issue, we'll add multi-hundred-thousands of HF ops
to provide a plethora of additional ingress points and let
the BPL system ops assess their network reliability from that.

This must be where I saw that idea! And it makes perfect sense.

I don't think we'll be hearing any protests over this proposal
from Yaecomwood either.

Not at all.

But the amateur market is tiny compared to consumer electronics. Even if
FT-1000s were $1000, how many would Yaesu sell in the USA per year?

One "problem" rigmakers have is that ham gear tends to have a fairly long
useful life. A ten-year-old computer is generally considered to be almost
useless today, even if it was top of the line when it was made. But a ten year
old ham rig may be barely broken in. Going back still futher, not many people
are still watching TVs made in the early '60s, but many 40 year old Drake or
Collins lines are in daily use by hams - not out of nostalgia or technical
inertia, but because they were and are pretty good rigs.

73 de Jim, N2EY