On Sep 22, 8:32�pm, Scott wrote:
AJ Lake wrote:

The rest of the transceiver industry (other than you) apparently
thinks tube embedded HF transceivers are quite obsolete
for a wide
variety of reasons. Else they would be manufacturing
and selling them.

There are several reasons you don't see much manufactured tube gear,
such as a "modern" version of the TS-520S.

The first reason is cost. Getting tubes and tube-type parts made in
the quantities needed would be more expensive than using solid-state.
Manufacturers can't use parts found at hamfests/rallys/on eBay, and
gearing up to have stuff made custom is expensive and chancy. The
complexity of the rig in ways such as needing both high and low
voltage supplies adds to the cost, too.

The second reason is size.

The third and most important reason is that tubes have become electro-
politically incorrect. Admitting that an old technology can do
something - anything - better than a new one just rubs people the
wrong way. Putting a 7360 in the front end of a "modern" transceiver
would be an admission that there has been a better solution around for
decades, and a lot of folks don't want to admit that.

As a case in point, look at the Elecraft K2. When it was introduced
back in 1999, it blew away much more expensive rigs in many
performance criteria. Yet its hardware design is much simpler than
almost anything else on the market that comes close to its
performance. Worse, it turns the usual marketing ideas upside down in
that the basic rig is QRP and CW only *kit*, with 100W, SSB and many
other features as add-on options.

The conventional wisdom of 1999 said there was no market for such a
rig. But with almost no advertising over 6000 have been sold. And the
product line has grown in several directions since 1999, including the
K3, which has sold over 1500 units.

Even ham magazines print mostly solid state articles
using modern solid state parts,

How many complete multiband multimode transceiver projects have you
seen in US ham magazines in the past 10 or 20 years?

which is right since hams should learn to use
modern technology.

But who decides what is "modern"?

Is SSB "modern"? It was first used on the air in the 1920s, first used
by hams in the early 1930s, and has been commonly used by hams for 60-
odd years. Almost no other service uses SSB anymore.

Is AM "modern"? It was first used on the air in 1900, and by 1906 was
being heard across the Atlantic. It was common by the 1920s.

How about FM? It's only a couple decades newer than AM. Repeaters were
in common use in the land mobile services in the 1950s.

RTTY dates back to WW2, and although the mechanical teleprinters have
been replaced by computers the coding and FSK methods used are
basically unchanged for half a century plus.

Most of the technologies we hams use have long been abandoned by other
services, or are simply kept alive because of the large installed base
of users - which is slowly dwindling.

When they do print a tube article it's usually
described as nostalgia.

You mean history.

Except the Russians. �They were still using tube gear in their
military
back in the mid 80s. �Not susecptible to EMP (electromagnetic
pulse)
from a nuke going off. �They may STILL be using tubes...I'm out of the loop since leaving the military in the late 80s...

EMP was one reason, but there were others. A big one was that they had
the industrial capacity to make high quality tubes in huge numbers,
but not semiconductors, so the solid-state was reserved for where
nothing else would work.

Probably one reason there aren't more tube projects in QST, etc. is that
nobody is left who wants to learn an "obsolete" technology and
the old
timers aren't going to bother writing about them because all they
would
hear is bitching about how someone wrote an article on old
technology
and wasted the pages in QST, etc. �Just a guess.

Not exactly.

QST is a general-purpose magazine; the technical stuff largely goes to
QEX., which was created just for that purpose because the QST staff
got and keeps getting complaints that QST is "too technical" (!).

Way back in 1989 a magazine called "Electric Radio" appeared, and is
still going strong. It's a small mag that specializes in hollow-state
gear, but there's plenty of interest and homebrewing going on.

Most of all, the internet has made it possible to put far more info
out there than could fit in a magazine, without the cost and bother of
printing and postage. Even I have a webpage (google my call) with a
picture and description of my shack and rig. The resources out there
are incredible; the main problem is getting through it all!

73 de Jim, N2EY