I think you're 100% right, Wavetrapper. Craig and I have been good friends
since the late 1980s, and I'm very familiar with his approach to Kiwa
products. Like with the Kiwa MAP unit, the MW Loop was labor-intensive to
build (but not quite as bad a situation as with the MAP). The major products
at Kiwa have been a labor of love for a dwindling hobby crowd. He kept the
parts costs as low as possible by doing most of the work himself (you should
have seen the ingenious, screw-driven device he cobbled together to cut the
spiral grooves for the wire in the PVC pipe core of the MW Loop!). Craig
also built his own flow-solder table for soldering PCBs, if I recall, and a
number of other clever tools and construction aids.

Craig is more of an inventor/engineer than he is a business person who has
all the expenses and profits figured out to the last penny. He had a very
good career before Kiwa as a broadcast station engineer, and gained quite a
reputation for modifying expensive pro-recording consoles to produce better
sound. He still does some consulting on the side, but his heart is in the
Kiwa Electronics business.

Unfortunately, as the hobby slowly decline, we lose some of the quality
accessories and peripherals like the Kiwa MAP and the Kiwa MW Loop. I'm
aware of an amazing prototype replacement for the MW loop that Craig was
working on a few years back, but now I don't think he'll be producing it.

Guy Atkins
Puyallup, WA USA

"wavetrapper" wrote in message
oups.com...
Pure speculation on my part. There probably was profit in it but not
huge. That may have been a very labor intenstive product to build.

Hard to get materials is one factor. Also, the crowd of MW DX'ers gets
smaller and smaller with each passing year. Not to mention the
forthcoming destruction of the MW DX hobby courtesy of IBOC/digital
radio (thanks to the built in adjecent channel hash interference).

The cumulative effect of all of that may have made it more trouble than
it was worth and there isn't much in the way of "future growth."