Michael Black wrote:

Telamon ) writes:

Summary:
There is not enough of a market for them to recover their engineering
costs, which must occur due to a parts shortage for the current design.

If the market improves then they may jump back in with a new design.

And of course, this has happened before. Drake was out of the receiver
business from about the mid-eighties (when they dropped the R7 and
any ham equipment) to when they introduced the R8 in the early nineties.

Drake is actually a faily old company at this point. They were around
with accessories before the introduced the 1 in the late fifties, had
a couple of decades of selling shortwave receivers and amateur transmitting
gear, and then dropped it continuing on with satellite receiver equipment.
Their website now talks about a lot of commercial grade equipment, so
the company doesn't seem to be going anywhere, even if it is dropping
shortwave receivers. If they were only making shortwave receivers,
one could imagine they'd not have lasted so long. Most of the old
time receiver manufacturers that went out of business in the late sixties
or early seventies suffered elsewhere, which meant they couldn't afford
to keep the shortwave business going.

Michael


I wonder if they would sell the design to a small company to update
and sell under a different name? I was involved in a number of receiver
redesigns due to obsolete parts when while I worked at Microdyne.

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida