Hi Andrew, I’m the CTO of Elecraft and principal designer of our transceivers. I’ll try to address your issues.
During the few weeks since Dayton, about half of our customer support staff has been on unexpected leave (parent illness, etc.). We brought a very senior tech to help, but it’s been a bit of a fire drill. We also have two of our sales staff on leave, which has resulted in unexpectedly long response times to phone calls and email. This situation is of course temporary. Meanwhile, I’m even taking some of the overload myself, as you can see :) > Before Dayton, in order to replace my FT-857D I decided to buy a KX2 for > Field Day. I purchased and waited for it to ship, which took about 8 days > (approximately). I did not have it in time for Dayton, which I was OK > with. When asked if I could take advantage of any Dayton deals, I was told > "No". OK, no problem. Usually the radios ship more quickly than this, but we do take some with us to Dayton each year for walk-up sales. Since you fell into a certifiable gray area with respect to Dayton timing, we should have credited you back the show special on your KX2. I’ll make sure this happens. > When I went to Hamvention this year, I asked someone at the booth to "take > my money" and convince me to buy an Elecraft radio.... > I was a little bummed that someone didn't feel the need to really sell me > on the radio (they barely spoke to me).... Wow. You must have come to the booth when everyone on our regular sales staff, including myself, were on a lunch break. I did in-depth demonstrations of the KX2 and KX3 hundreds of times, even to the point of taking the KX2 outside (twice) to do on-air demos using the radio hand-held with a whip. I’ll make sure that our regular crew and temporary subs don't miss such an opportunity again. Normally we engage potential customers to the point that, by the time they’ve decided yea or nay, we know their favorite bands, modes, other hobbies, and the names of their pets. > A few days after Dayton I get my KX2 and begin using it. I am mostly a CW > op and noticed that after a while the radio would "stick" on CW. It would > let out long tones etc., I did not see the error to start, but after a day > or so I saw a temp warning. I reached out to Elecraft, they said they > would fix the radio anytime I sent it back. I asked if I could wait until > after Field Day since this was purchased for that specific reason. They > were more than happy to oblige. Well, bummer. It’s very rare for any of our radios to have an out-of-the-box issue like this. Sorry you’ve encountered such a problem right before FD! > During this time I decided I was going to buy a K3S. ...RF/SQL Pot just was > not working. We tried all kinds of things to fix > this, to no avail....came to the conclusion that one of the pots had a > missing solder. Also extremely rare. I’ll talk to CS and get the info back to our manufacturing department. They do 100% visual inspection with very sophisticated optical gear, but apparently they missed this one. > I go about soldering the bad pot for RF/SQL and the K3S is back in > business.... Thank you very much for correcting this problem yourself. We greatly appreciate it when customers take our “hands-on...” slogan literally. > Days go by and it is now Monday. I reach out to Elecraft to see if my KX2 > had shipped as I had not seen a tracking number. The response was a > bummer. The KX2 didn't ship and they need to see if there is a hold on > KX2's being shipped. I’ll be investigating this as soon as I finish typing. As I mentioned above, there was a bit of a personnel shortage recently. > K3S is working, KX2 still needs to be replaced, but I am thousands into the > Elecraft brand and both radios have had problems with quality control. Fortunately rare. But thank you for bringing it to my attention. > NOTE: Notice I didn't even complain about the artifact on the LCD screen > during boot, which is yet a whole separate issue, which probably should be > fixed as well. In theory, the LCD controller IC powers up in an unknown (scrambled) state. But some of the controllers seem to reset to all segments off, while others don’t. This may be something we can fix in firmware, and it’s on my task list. Thanks for your patience, and let me know if anything further comes up. 73, Wayne, N6KR CTO, Elecraft, Inc. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
