From: "Dee Flint" on Wed,May 11 2005 3:14 pm

"John Smith" wrote in message
...
I don't think the "apple boys" had ever designed a complete computer
before
they did--indeed, don't remember anyone else (or team of engineers,
techs,
scientists, etc...) doing a desktop before then...

You mean, China, Russia, India, USA, Canada, So. American, Mexico,
etc--and
every gov't, business, private individual, ham and cb'er... is not a
big
enough market... these things would be manufactured in China
yanno!!!

Nope the entire world wide population of hams is NOT enough. The US
has
just under 700,000.

As of 11 May 2005, www.hamdata.com reports 723,737 total
U.S. amateur radio licensees.

Japan has somewhere around 1 million (there numbers are
hard to determine due to their licensing system). The remainder of
the
world combined has right around the same total of the US. This gives
a
worldwide ham population of under 2.5 million. So starting from
that
rough estimate, let's look at some figures. Very, very few people buy
a new
HF rig annually. Just using the people I know, it's more like every 5
to 10
years. So let's use an average of 7.5 years. That means a total of
333,000
new radios (rounding off the answer) sold in any given year. Now
split that
between 3 makers, yielding 111,000 units per maker.

Only "three?" :-)

That's pretty low
volume to undertake radical development. We're probably lucky that we
get
any new features.

Tsk, tsk. Having first started to legally transmit
RF (on HF) in 1953, I've been watching the progress
of most ALL radio technology for a mere half century.
...and seen the DESIGN as well as manufacturing shift
to Asia. In Japan alone, there are at least FOUR
corporations doing HF radio design, not just three.
USA designers and manufacturers ARE there NOW, but
none of them are Collins, National Radio, RME, or
Hallicrafters. [only Collins Radio is left of all
of them and they do NOT make ham equipment]

Take FREQUENCY CONTROL, an essential thing for stable
SSB work on HF. The PLL took care of that nicely
with - perhaps - Icom leading the way to get 10 Hz
increments at quartz crystal control. To save some
costs, the three major players (Icom, Yaesu, Kenwood)
switched over to DDS (Direct Digital Syntheses) after
trying out 'fractional-N' PLL synthesizers.

Asian DESIGNERS and manufacturers were there first
with the LCD screens to show analog information in
digital form. They may also have been the first to
include microprocessors and microcontrollers to act
as control-display interfaces, saving hundreds of
store dollars per unit and eliminating mechanical
couplings almost entirely.

Try DSP (Digital Signal Processing). That's in the
ham gear of TODAY. Not a "first" in amateur rigs
since it was first introduced on consumer electronics.
But, it is THERE. Today. [I could go on...:-) ]

100K production lots are "low volume to undertake
radical development?!?!?" Oh, my. Let's look at
that in more detail...say at 10K production runs.
Try, for example, with an average price of $1000
per HF ham transceiver. Sell price dollar flow
would be $10 MILLION. Designer-manuafcturer dollar
flow is roughly half that, $5 MILLION to split off
many ways: component costs, burden, advertising,
profit, losses on defects, to name the major items.
Perhaps $500K can be the amount amortized for the
actual R&D. At $50/hour in estimated engineering
salaries-plus-burden of Japanese companies, that's
10,000 man-hours for the design-development budget.
A team of 10 then has 1000 hours average to do one
task. At 50 hours per week, that's 20 weeks to
get what is largely (in practice) the production
side of the house going, at least a third of a
year.

But, very very few designs are "brand-new" in ANY
catalog. The majority are revisions of the older
models, perhaps using the same "universal" cast
framework-support and cabinet but needing only the
front-panel face-lift. The time - at 10K run
lots - is plenty long enough to come up with the
"new improved state-of-the-art" things that glow
triumphantly (in purple prose) from the ads in
QST. :-)

Do the big makers have "single model" catalogs?
No. Not even the medium-sized ones. All have
MANY models and branches...such as the Handheld
transceivers. The HTs plus VHF/UHF base stations
tend to be the company bread-and-butter items,
sold - in almost the same features as for hams -
to industry, business, and government. With
some revisions of the basic structure those
become "amateur radios."

On the down side, the HF bands are NOT a big-
ticket item for communications as they once were.
Today the RF world is deep into cellular
telephony for sites and providers, and some
for users (at companies with large production
lines and consumer marketing structures). The
world of communications has moved UP and over
that mythical, artificial dividing line of
30 MHz.