[TenTec] Jupiter frequency jump?

[Bill Meahan]

On Wed, 05 Dec 2001 18:19:34 -0500
Carter Grabarczyk <k8vt@ameritech.net> wrote:

I have been more pleased to deal with. 
> 
> I don't know about the economics of the Pegasus or Jupiter, but on a
> $2400 radio like the Omni VI, it would seem that a few bucks of bypass
> capacitors and beads would/should not be an issue.
> 

Depends on volume, profit margins and how much TT makes in the other
divisions. 

I used to work for a major automotive company where folks would sell
their grandmother for a fraction of a cent savings on a screw. Looked at
in isolation, that appears pretty silly. However, when you use 40-50
million of those screws a year, that "fraction of a cent" adds up pretty
quickly. Likewise, "it would only cost a buck to add <foo> to a $30,000
car" suddenly becomes a $2,000,000 expense if you use <foo> on two
million units a year. And neither of those examples takes into account
the engineering costs, the manufacturing costs, the warranty costs, the
inventory costs, the balance-out costs at end-of-life yadda, yadda,
yadda.

The folks at Yaecomwood make other products besides just the ham rigs
cited. In fact, the ham stuff is probably just a small fraction of a
percent of their total manufacturing volume. If the same beaded cable is
used in one (or more) of the high-volume product lines, its cost is
amortized over the volume of the other product(s) so adding it to the
ham rig might actually be a cost *savings* from the point of view of the
ham rig since a custom part would not have to be designed, manufactured,
inventoried, warrantied or balanced out at end-of-life. Believe me, in
manufacturing, cost is "job one" regardless of what slogans Marketing
comes up with.

With an undoubtedly smaller volume of products over which to amortize
costs, TT has to be very careful where it adds costs to a product. Which
is not to say they should be let off the hook for RF in the Jupiter,
just that it's understandable why they might not use the same number of
beads and caps as Yaecomwood.

Back in the 80's, AMP used to make these wonderful little devices that
looked like a run-of-the-mill feedthrough capacitor but was really a
little pi-net lowpass filter based on a "coil" consisting of a wire run
through ferrite. Those puppies were more expensive than plain
feedthrough caps, but a lot less than a lot of other alternatives. A
little shielding with all low-frequency or DC wires run through the AMP
filters could work wonders in even very high EMI environments. A couple
of arc welders can generate far more RF than any ham rig and I used to
have to deal with dozens of them in the space of the average living
room. I wonder if they still make those filters?

-- 
Bill Meahan  WA8TZG         wmeahan@wa8tzg.org
"Always do right. This will gratify some people 
   and astonish the rest." -- Mark Twain