Recent travels and tax preparations have slowed shipments slightly, and a temporary shortage of barrel material caused us to put barrels out of stock. New barrel material should be in shortly, and production will ramp up again.
The website move appears to have gone well. In addition there was a short site outage Monday morning when the renewal had a problem with out of date information. This was fixed as quickly as we knew about it.
This weekend we had a big packing party and prepared a lot of boxes for UPS. Set a new record for one weekend.
We had a busy weekend at Monterey Radiofest visiting with lots of folks and answering Launcher questions. In between I worked on a new Web Catalog which is now online (not bad for four days part-time effort). I also see that the website was very busy with lots of hits and orders over the weekend, probably relating to the March QST photo and mention.
If you have any questions or suggestions on the new Catalog website, see the Contact Us web page on the right and drop us a line.
Some folks are questioning the long lead times. I am working hard on that, but I don’t want folks to be surprised if it is not instantly better. Lots of parts are on order and already in stock, but a lot of machining remains to be done, stuffing boxes, packing and so forth. The assembled launchers take a lot more time, so we will keep on it till we get caught up. I see Elecraft is four months out on the new K3, so it may already be too late to order K3’s for Field Day…
Thanks & 73!
I see the new March QST features a photo of one of our Launchers in the hands of Ed, WD4DTC. Great job, Ed!
We are preparing to depart tomorrow for Radiofest in Monterey. This weekend we will operate a booth at the ‘Fest. Come by and say hi if you are in the area!
We are turning out launchers, but are a bit behind. There was a big surge in January after the ordering was turned back on, and we are still chewing through that. Order turnaround is almost up to 6 to 7 weeks, so we have out of stock’ed the built launchers until we can reduce the lead time. I have more parts coming in, but the time to machine them and pack them is harder to find. We will be hitting it hard again after this weekend.
We have also started a new catalog replacement program that will solve the issues some are having with the present catalog. Internet Explorer seems to work, but other browsers are not happy.
Thanks for your patience,
– Alan, WB6ZQZ
I have been testing a different trigger, and early results are excellent. The flow rate exceeds the standard trigger in dynamic bench testing. Launcher testing is still ahead, but these triggers have been used successfully on launchers before, so no difficulty is expected there. This posting is to help those who have been seeking triggers independently and provide some details.