Ralph Mowery wrote:

I know how that can be...................parts for older units are hard to
get ahold of. I remember years ago, I called Rockwell for a quote on the
main tuning knob for a 651S-1. The price for tooling, etc was 5000
dollars!
That receiver is no longer supported, and the only way to get ahold of
parts
for that unit is from the surplus market.
Same thing goes for the KWM380/HF380.

They can not make any money if they do not sell ney radios. Most companies
make and support items for a short period of time. After that they have the
next modle ready to go. By pricing the repairs at a very high price many
will buy the new stuff. It is difficult to keep up with all the parts of
equipment that is years old.


They already had the bare dies, and the mounts. These receivers were
barely four years old and had cost close to $5,000 each we had about 100
of them in service. They had a high failure rate and had used up all
their spares and wanted us to pay more than the price of a new unit per
transistor, so I fixed the units I could, and replaced the others with
new Microdyne equipment. It wasn't very long before no one would buy
their commercial SAT TV equipment because of poor support. By the time
they were out of their hand mounted dies they could have bought a
comparable part already assembled for repairs. I worked in that business
a few years ago, and the company supported most equipment for 15 years.
When they dropped their commercial SAT TV product line, they sold the
remaining parts and all rights to one of their techs, and he still
supports them from his one man shop.


I forgot the price but in the news paper about 10 years ago it cost the
military about $ 20 K just to get a diode that should have cost a couple of
dollars. The military was out of them and the manufacture had to make a run
of a few thousand . You just can not make one semiconductor.

There is a good chance that while they were looking for that part,
another military installation was pitching it into the scrap bin to be
auctioned off for salvage. Today there are companies that specialize in
producing short runs of obsolete semiconductors, and others that buy up
small stocks of every part they find on the spot market to provide EOL
support.

Lansdale is one company that is licensed by Motorola / ON Semi to to
manufacture most of their discontinued products.

http://shop.store.yahoo.com/american...tor/index.html is
a company with a lot of oddball semis for EOL support.
--
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Take a look at this little cutie! ;-)
http://home.earthlink.net/~mike.terrell/photos.html

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida