[CQ-Contest] Alpha 87A Alpha Max -- Mea Culpa

[Dick Green WC1M]

Our Alpha Day wasn't just for 87As. It was for any Alpha amp, and our large club (YCCC) had plenty of owners with Alpha amps of all vintages. Also, the tech (it was Brad) setup shop at the house of an owner of what was at the time the brand-new 9500. Evidently, the first production run of that amp was so flawed Brad had to bring a 9500 with him to replace it. I suspect the company was so worried about the bad publicity the amp was getting that they were willing to send someone out to replace, install and test a new amp. Servicing other amps probably helped cover the cost of the trip. I paid $315 for Brad to replace and reprogram my CPU (I had replaced the MAX232 level converter, which was also fried.) 

Acom didn't charge me for a similar on-the-spot repair, but I traded the boss some software I'd written.

73, Dick WC1M

-----Original Message-----
From: Art Boyars [mailto:artboyars at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 6, 2016 10:31 PM
To: CQ-Contest Reflector <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Alpha 87A Alpha Max -- Mea Culpa

It's a good season for penitence.

Regarding WC1M's "Alpha Day" I had posted:

      Wow!  That's gotta be a lot of 87A's needing fixed
      to make it worth sending the technician out.

K3ZW points out that more models than the 87A were covered, so maybe there were, indeed, a lot of amplifiers in the population.  Still, without the numbers, we don't know.

73, Art K3KU