whining

[DFREY]

>Sorry for whining.  Just trying to express my concerns about this radio in 
>an obviously futile attempt to make this radio contest worthy.  Every 
>conversation I have had with TenTec (and you echo this same thing in your 
>emails) is that I should learn to adjust to the radio, and not the radio 
>adjust to my needs.  Well guess what... The things that bother me are the 
>same things that keep a lot of other guys from buying it.  I feel 
>frustrated that I am forced to buy Japaneese and that the Japaneese seem 
>(in my experience) to be more receptive to the ham community than the 
>Americans. Tom Salvetti is a great talker.  Meanwhile, his radio doesn't 
>get better.


     Hi Bill, 
     
     You are right.  I probably give them more slack than most because I 
     worked there for nine years.   As a CEO, you should understand better 
     than most that the first job of a company is to stay in business, make 
     money, and prosper.  Only a relative few of the Omni VIs out there in 
     radioland are owned by active or casual contesters.  The cost 
     associated with even a small change to an existing product is 
     enormous.  Not only is there cost associated with doing the work, 
     testing it, changing the documentation for both the customer and the 
     production tooling, but there is also the time/resources lost from 
     whatever new design/development project the improvement effort was 
     stolen from.  Plus the cost associated with keeping the old customers 
     happy with upgrades.
     
     The Omni 6 is a winner:  High bang for the buck, super reliability, 
     great specs, and excellent service.  If they recognize a real problem 
     they'll fix it.  It was designed by committee with no active 
     contesters on it.  It is not revolutionary in any sense but rather 
     evolutionary: it grew from a long line of steadily improving radios 
     called Omni, Corsair and Paragon.  I had some input and maybe I was 
     the one who hooked them up with K1EA and N6TR.  
     
     Ten-Tec is 5% the size of any of it's honorable Japanese competitors.  
     They have no other commercial or consumer electronics lines over which 
     to spread the costs of new development.  Tom Salvetti is a good talker 
     but also a good listener.  There comes a time when you have to stop 
     patching up one model and start taking notes for the next.  He'll 
     never tell you that because it will affect the sales of the present 
     models.  That's a simple truth.
     
     You are very involved and have been most generous of time and 
     resources to support contesting and the Ten-Tec reflector.  For how 
     long - six months maybe.  Give it a little time.  Your business is in  
     a rapidly expanding market often oversubscribed and undercapitalized.  
     The amateur radio market is not expanding.  These guys have been in 
     business for more than 30 years.  They take a very hard and long term 
     view of the ham radio business and shoot for the center of the target. 
     They are successful survivors.  Sure they could do better with more 
     resources and better market input.  That's what this reflector's all 
     about.
     
     And I could still be there making $30K a year, taking grief from 
     appliance operators asking for a clarifier rather than RIT, old timers 
     looking for tuning controls, and contesters crying for an immediate 
     response to the latest thingy from K/I/Y at JA Inc - whatever.  It can 
     happen, it sometimes does, at Dayton in the spring.
     
     Keep the faith.
     
     
     Dick,  K4XU