On Jan 29, 1:02�pm, Bob Brock wrote:
On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:52:16 -0500, "KH6HZ" wrote:
"Bob Brock" writes:

In response to "Dee Flint" :

Right. *Radio Shack pimps the hot products for the moment. The way I see
it, them not even carrying license manuals speaks volumes about demand for
them. *Now, when you walk into a Radio Shack and see loads of HF antennas,
HF rigs, and a shelf of study guides; then you can say that Ham radio is
back in demand.

Radio Shack cannot compete with big discount houses like HRO.

You must be going to the wrong Radio Shacks. *I saw stereos and TV's
all over the place when I went in.

But you didn't see computers, did you?

Once upon a time, RS was fairly big player in the consumer computer
market. But then they found it was too competitive a market, and they
could not compete with computer stores like CompUSA, MicroCenter,
etc. Now RS sells cables, adapters, disks, etc., but not computers.

*In theory, Radio Shack should be
in a much better position to sell ham equipment than HRO provided they
could sell it. *If you don't believe in economy of scale, look at
Wal-Mart and get back with me.

Right - and Wal-Mart doesn't sell ham gear.

The economy of scale situation in ham radio today is mail order/
internet sales, plus hamfest/conventions. because they're the most
competitive for most things. Some manufacturers sell don't sell
through dealers at all - Ten Tec and Elecraft are two examples.

In the bad old days, there were "radio parts stores" here in the
Philadelphia area. Plus we had mail order to Allied, Newark and
Lafayette. Today the parts stores are gone but the mail order is
bigger than ever: Allied and Newark are still around, plus Mouser and
Digi-Key.

btw, Digi-Key got its name because it started out as a tiny mailorder
business about 1968. They sold RTL logic chips to hams for Morse Code
keyers. QST, APril 1968. Then they added some popular transistors, and
sockets, and resistors....and the rest is history.

The radio parts stores existed, IMHO, because electronics weren't that
reliable back then - and they were expensive. TVs, radios, "hi-fis",
ham gear, etc., were usually fixed rather than discarded if they
stopped working, and those stores sold a steady stream of parts to
keep them working. There were also lots of hams and nonhams building
stuff from scratch to save money over buying, or to build things that
nobody manufactured.

All that has changed. Most consumer electronics is so reliable and
so inexpensive now that when it fails it is usually simply replaced.
Plus
the cost of labor often makes it uneconomical to fix a failed device.
In
fact, much of it is replaced *before* it fails. So the repair parts
business isn't what it was.

In most cases, you won't save money building electronic devices from
new parts *if* a similar item is manufactured by some company already,
because they get their parts in quantity and you don't. Any savings
come from using parts that are not bought new, and custom designs that
nobody manufactures.

The way to "sell" ham radio is simply to make it more visible to the
general public. The biggest barrier to that, IMHO, is anti-antenna
restrictions that are more common and more onerous every year.

How many of us first became aware of the existence of local amateurs
by seeing their antennas?

73 de Jim, N2EY