I have a ring rotor I am putting up and I have
assembled it and tested it in the shop first. There
were none of the problems described in this post. It
works fine and smoothly.
I think a lot of hams have some misconception about
their market clout. The ham market is very small and
does not justify expensive tooling. You should expect
to do some grinding and thoughtful finish work. Hams
also seem to be really cheap (me too, I think). If
you think $1000 is a lot to pay, it seems to me that
you are simply out of touch. Let's see, what would I
have to pay for a piece of specialized commercial gear
for which there is a tiny market? Maybe $10k? Maybe
have to have it made up myself by a machine shop at a
cost of $20k or more? I think $1k is a good price and
I don't really mind having to fiddle with it a bit if
I feel the manufacturer has made an honest attempt to
make a good product (UNLIKE MFJ, imho).
I think one of thing that leads hams to be very
demanding (and cheap too) are the relatively low cost
Japanese transceivers. They are nicely tooled and we
get to where we expect that level of tooling on all
the products we buy. But the transceivers are the
lowest common denominator - every ham has to have one.
So the volume is much higher than for a specialty
item like a ring rotor. I appreciate the trouble
taken by the maker to bring such a thing to the market
for my convenience. It is probably more trouble than
profit for him.
But I don't mean to imply that we should not give the
makers feedback. It is important to let them know
what experience you have had with their product. The
good ones will keep trying to improve. No doubt the
difference between the first fellow's experience with
his Ring Rotor and my experiece with mine is time and
the improvements made during the interim.
So mark me down as an endorsement for the low volume
but very nice to have available Ring Rotor.
Mike wy6k
--- Glenn Rattmann <k6na@cts.com> wrote:
> At 02:06 PM 03/01/2001 +0000, you wrote:
> >If you go with the ring rotator you will have to do
> some finessing with
> the ring part to make
> >it work smoothly. I had to grind the outer diameter
> of the ring to make it
> round
> >and I had to file the teeth of the gear on the
> inside of the ring to get
> >constant engagement with the motor. Put the ring
> rotator together on the
> bench
> >first to get it to work properly then do a trial
> assembly on the tower at
> a low
> >height to make sure all the parts clear the tower.
> I had to do some mods
> to get
> >clearance between the ring and the tower. I also
> had the grind the slots
> for the
> >motor to get full contact with the motor gear and
> ring gear.
>
> Wow. I don't know the current retail price of this
> machine (I assume they
> are a kilobuck, or more...), but an additional price
> is described in the
> paragraph above. If this customer's experience is
> true, and typical, the
> manufacturer probably needs to go back to the
> drawing board, or improve the
> manufacturing process.
>
> If this were a commercial-to-commercial product, I
> doubt he could hang on
> to his customer base for long.
>
> I guess that's why they call us amateurs.
>
> 73,
>
> Glenn K6NA
>
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