[TenTec] Burghardt amateur center

[Dr. Gerald N. Johnson]

On Sat, 2009-08-22 at 08:55 -0400, John Harden, D.M.D. wrote:
> At age 15 in 1959 I ordered a National NC-57B receiver from World Radio 
> Labs. The price was $50.00 and I paid Leo $5.00/month. As I recall it 
> came by Railway Express. A few years back I e-mailed Leo and thanked him 
> for making gear available to a teen ager with very limited funds. He 
> e-mailed me back and thanked me! Those were the days.
> 
> Fortunately I was able to upgrade to Collins later, and after they left 
> the ham market I moved to Ten-Tec. I now have Ten-Tec gear for 160 -10 
> meters, and even 6 & 2 meters. The only rice box I have in my shack is a 
> 440 MHz transceiver as there are no American manufacturers of 70 CM gear 
> that I am aware of. Ten-Tec supports virtually all of their gear and is 
> great to deal with. I know that their service is not cheap but nothing 
> worthwhile is.

Actually there is Down East Microwave making transverters (so the HF
side has to have FM if that's your interest) as well as Elecraft.
Otherwise there is no FM made in the US other than Motorola and its not
so convenient to use with ham repeaters if you want to move frequency
often or have many available.
> 
> It's refreshing to have Ten-Tec & Elecraft in the market place. I like 
> gear you can work on. Rice boxes are never supported long and the 
> service is terrible. I'd build my own before I'd buy one. And I have 
> many times.

I suspect the latest Tec-tec and I know the latest Elecraft gear are
mostly surface mount and not so easy to work on. Building the K-3 is a
matter of assembling prebuilt boards into the box and setting computer
parameters to correct for the master oscillator errors. Repairing
surface mount is a whole lot different from repairing DIP chips on a
Corsair vintage Tentec.
> 
> 73,
> 
> John, W4NU
> Atlanta, GA
> K4JAG (1959 to 1998)
> 
73, Jerry, K0CQ