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Kiwa MW Air-Core Loop Antenna {In-the-News} FS / FA
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." |
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