[Amps] 8877s, ETO and the General Electric Contract

[Dave Haupt]

There’s an amazing amount of rumour and innuendo that
goes on about the ETO amplifier for GE medical
systems, the legendary 8877 problems, and ETO’s loss
of the contract.  It’s now been almost 10 years since
I was personally involved, and 15 years since the
incident took place, so the original players have all
moved on.  In fact the amplifier companies themselves
no longer exist with the same structure or ownership,
so I think some correcting of erroneous statements at
this point won’t hurt anything.  Besides, as I age,
I'm finding it a lot harder to remain the strong,
silent type... ;)

I speak from a somewhat unusual perspective – I was
the senior RF engineer at the company that was awarded
the GE contract after ETO “lost” it.  Let’s nip one
error in the bud right now.

It has been said,  “GE Medical cancelled the contract
years after Eimac fixed the heat dam problem.”  This
statement is wrong.  The amplifiers which replaced the
ETO amplifiers have been decommissioned for quite some
time, and you can purchase subassemblies at hamfests. 
I did just that – and the 300 watt solid state driver
board which I obtained thusly has a date code on it of
early 1988.  Eimac has acknowledged that tubes
manufactured from June 1986 to August 1988 were
defective.  So it would seem the replacement amplifier
was in production while the cathode dam episode was
ensuing and anybody who understands the engineering
process will correctly surmise that the amplifier was
under development even before the cathode dam episode
began.  The amplifier was, in fact, a custom, built
for GE.

So, the loss of the GE contract by ETO very likely had
absolutely nothing to do with the cathode dam episode.
 There are many, many reasons why a contract such as
the General Electric MRI amplifier may be moved from
one company to another, and technical performance is
rarely the reason.  The GE contract was a big one, and
issues that were important to GE are of a magnitude
nobody in the ham industry could probably come to
grips with.  It’s entirely possible that ETO did
nothing wrong at all, and still lost the contract.  Of
course, “we” (employees of amplifier company B),
figured we knew why they lost the contract, but our
likelihood of being right is not much higher than the
likelihood of any comments on the AMPS reflector about
the topic being correct.

 
The only fair thing to say about the GE contract,
8877s, and ETO is that for the purposes of things
discussed on this list, there is absolutely no
relevant conclusion that can be drawn from the fact
that GE switched vendors.

I can tell you this – for the five years after that,
when we went into competition against ETO for
commercial amplifier business, ETO always had a
technically solid offering.  They were, without a
doubt, a formidable competitor from an engineering
standpoint.

Since those days, I have had opportunities to interact
with Dick Ehrhorn, W0ID (founder of ETO).  I found
this ex-competitor of mine to be highly intelligent,
extraordinarily capable of rendering accurate,
well-researched engineering decisions, and what is
most important to me, of utmost ethics.  I would be
more than pleased to have the opportunity to work with
him.

No, I will not provide additional details privately,
so don’t ask!  ;)

73,

Dave W8NF 


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