I have some comments having spent a career as a government contractor.
Also as head of a repair dept. of a large regional medical supply
company selling electronic medical equipment in both the USA and Mexico.
Yes, a lot of companies put up specs on what turns out later to be
vaporware for one reason or another. They may have good intentions to
produce a design, but on the way to production lose an essential vendor
or programmer, or have parts supply problems, and have to start from
square one more than once.
On the issue of no phone, but email Service requests: This gives you a
paper trail; it is in the customer's best interests to have a date and
time you first contacted Ten Tec, and same for their Merchandise Return
Authorization, and for efficient tracking of the equipment once it
arrives at Ten Tec.
Unsaid has been the fact that in the old days, you could jawbone the
telephone service person for additional answers to service questions or
operating questions quite far afield from what you called in about, and
the first thing you know, even a $12 an hour phone contact person has
shot his day on just a few such calls.
You can scan read emails and identify the ones that may be in need of
greater study quite readily.
Ten Tec has noted, the person on service intake does not work 5 days a
week. Given they are in the Eastern time zone, their day ends well
before most of the country.
An all the way around paper trail, or digital trail, is good to have for
service.
I ran a couple of service shops in the Medical equipment repair sector,
and we relied quite successfully on a multi-copy service/ repair set of
forms. We had more than one employee in the service dept. but had a
single point of record on repairs in progress or scheduled, and could
keep up with the demand: "When is Dr. so and so's diathermy going to be
ready?" Today, that is much easier to do on a computer; to keep a
history file on a repair, and even previous repairs to the same s/n unit.
It is not too much to ask customers to send in an email when they want
to return something for service. Hopefully, the digital input will make
the customer think in detail how to present his problem, and thus make a
more clear and complete service request.
The company does not have to waste valuable time calling and recalling
certain customers who may have odd schedules or be in other time zones.
Send an email answer and the customer can react on his email schedule.
BTW, I have used some of the SDR radios and find they have problems with
causing spurious interference in Field Day conditions, so I doubt they
are the "be all, end all", some attribute to those designs.
And radios should have knobs, but I doubt there is enough demand for a
remote knob on future Eagle models, unless that is made a standard
accessory for a number of models.
I have been a ham since 1957, and have seen up close, or well documented
in the ham community, a number of companies stagger and ultimately fail:
Hallicrafters, Hammarlund,
Swan, Atlas, Harvey Wells, National, etc., and some, (most ), of the
early FM VHF ham radio companies, etc.
I was even doing consulting for one start up company, who paid for one
of my designs in Parts! That was a ham company who made a fine 2m radio
with a sole source transistor front end, that was discontinued, and they
did not get a lifetime supply of the part before that happened.
Their whole front end had to be redesigned with a higher cost active device.
Most start ups back then at least were underfunded and shoe string
operations. A few had some tough times but ultimately survived by
government contracts and quick design services to fill a niche demand.
They survived to allow the owners to reach normal retirement age, and
sell out.
We who have had fun with many Ten Tec radio models wish Mike and co.
All the best and much success.
Stuart Rohre
K5KVH
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