Bill MacLane wrote:
> After spending most of my career working on commercial antenna
> products I have yet to find any amateur antenna products worth the
> cost especially if they are Cushcraft, Hustler, Hygain, MFJ, and
> several others. I'm sure somebody out there may makes some good ham
> antennas. I just haven't seen any worth what most sell for. Now
> I'm off my soap box. I can understand your frustration. American
> quality has been the pits for decades and that says little for ....
> well you know where most of our things are made. Quality control has
> always been make the least acceptable product for the most money one
> can get for it.
>
> 73, Bill AI4WM
>
>
Since commercial antenna products typically cost substantially more than
amateur market products, I suspect that the problem is rooted more in
that there's a certain mininum cost to build anything. That is, paying
half as much doesn't give you half the quality, but more like 1/10th.
So you wind up paying less than commercial prices for a whole lot less
quality than commercial.
Figure that things like raw materials are going to be about the same
(e.g. the ham mfr and the commercial mfr pay the same price for aluminum
stock..maybe even the ham pays more, because it's smaller volume).
The cost to "run the business" (administrative overhead, ordering, etc.)
is going to be about the same either way, and independent of the quality.
So all that's left is the amount of labor in the actual manufacturing.
If you want to cut costs, you hire cheaper (less skilled) people or use
less of their time (e.g. don't bother inspecting).
A typical multiband beam might weigh 50-60 lbs, and at $6-7/lb for
Aluminum tubing, that's $300-400 just for the raw materials before you
do any manfacturing. If you build a lot of antennas, you might be able
to get the aluminum cost down to $250.
When I worked for a small manufacturer, we used to figure that the
retail sell price had to be around 5-10x the raw material cost,
depending on the complexity and amount of proprietary knowledge
involved. I'd say an antenna is on the low end (not like there's some
exotic knowledge you're burning into an EPROM or providing a custom
calibration curve).
That 5x factor covers the mfr cost, the inventory holding cost, the
admin, etc. (e.g. in our example, the antenna would list at
$1250-$1500... that would be in the "commercial" market..)
But let's say we've already got the jigs set up, and you're looking at
something as complex as a C3 or a X7.. there's half a dozen elements
which need to be cut to length (maybe 20-30 pieces overall) and drilled.
Some bracketry for attaching the elements to the boom. If it takes,
say, 10 minutes to do each piece, a worker can probably turn out an
antenna in an 8 hour day. You pay your toilers $10/hr, and all of your
costs probably double or triple that (insurance, heat, lights, etc), so
the burdened labor is $160-240...
You're already up to about $500 for that antenna, which lists for $850
or so. There's not a lot left for profit, distributor and retail
markup, etc. (each of which might add 10-20% or so to the tab..), not
to mention the cost of money; You have to pay your employee today, but
you don't get paid by the distributor for at least 30 days after
shipping (if you're lucky!).
You can see that selling that product into the ham market at $800 is
going to not leave a lot of budget for QA, etc., but selling at $1500 in
the commercial market leaves a much heftier cushion to work with. That
$700 increase in margin can easily pay for someone to spend an entire
day doing QA on that antenna and making sure that there's the right
number of bolts in the kit, and maybe a couple spares, etc.
It's really nothing to do with American or Chinese quality or lack
thereof.. it's the relentless drive to the bottom for cost, when there's
an irreducible minimum cost to make the thing. Overall, ham gear costs a
lot less now than it used to, if inflation is taken into account.. that
reduction in cost had to come from somewhere.
(unless you get BIG volumes.. then you can move your mfr to somewhere
that labor is $1/hr instead of $25-30/hr, and ship container loads
around.. the Wal-mart model)
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