Mega congratulations to 13 LR 131 / P for making an excellent contact on his Albrecht AE201s. Really what’s not to like to being out and about and making a really decent contact on SSB with a hand held radio. Contact was to 26 AT / LAN located I think in Lancashire as part of the regions award in the U.K. on behalf of the AlfaTango group. Great contact and let’s hope many more to come!
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Hi: Simon. I meant no offense & was not suggesting I did not believe you personally but that a company like Cobra would have to sell 5000 pcs per month every month. Sorry if I wrote it such a way that you thought I was not believing you, that was not my intention. Cheers.
Hi Bruce. No stress. I wrote what factories have told me. It’s true Cobra often run at a “generic” factory meaning toaster on Tuesday, TV Friday and not dedicated radio place. Dedicated factories where they only manufacture radios they survive on quantity ordered so low 100 here and there they’ll not allow it as worthless. BUT YES it’s true to make at non dedicated place but place that will make it then quantity not so important
Regards 🤝
I hear you. I never heard of having to sell 5000 radios per month every month for the life of the radios production. That seems way out there. I can’t imagine any company, Uniden, President, Cobra, Midland or any other company that ever sold 5000 cb radios per month every month for the life of the radios production. I’m sure when new models come to market that there are decent initial sales numbers but no way would they be selling any radio no matter what the brand at a rate of 5000 per month every month for say 10 years or whenever they stopped making the radios. That seems impossible & I would hazard to say there have never been radio sales like that for even a big seller like a Cobra 148GTL / Cobra 2000GTL.
You enter a contract with the factory and tell them maximum you sell over life cycle of a product.. I can tell you absolutely factory will not set up a line based on “maybe we sell 10 a month” Uniden produce in 10,000-20,000 pieces.. Ask at a factory, please do. I did, I have and told same. BUT if you share costs with 8 or 10 others you can order let’s say self branded from 5,000 pieces. If you however pay all costs, don’t split costs, YOU pay all a factory wants to know exactly how many thousand you order per calendar month.. They don’t survive on here and there 20 pieces. You don’t believe me, actually I don’t care as covered in magazine articles over the years and it’s a cold hard fact.
Conversation ends here. I asked at QX, SR Corporatiom, Goodwill Telecom, Maxlog and ALL have contracts, minimum x thousand pieces per month, it’s how it is.
And by the way one of the names you mentioned buy and sell, order at least 40,000 mixed pieces a month, every single month… So sadly it happens whether you believe, don’t believe I can’t say more. It’s a fact
Hi: Simon. Yes I know how the factories feel about making the ssb compact cb’s.
But my point has always been that they don’t have to re-invent the wheel as it were
as this & many of it’s clone AM/FM/SSB handheld cb radios have already been
developed so it’s just a matter of taking the same board that’s already been designed
in these handhelds & put them in a Smart one or similar sized chassis. I’m sure it would
not take a ton of work to look at the circuit board layout of the Albrecht handheld & then simply
up size it to the chassis size of the CRT one or CRT Xenon. There is hardly any cost
involved as the board already exists. I think these SSB handhelds sound pretty decent
for the size. I use to own the Cherokee AH-100 that was AM/SSB but unfortunately
I dropped it on concreate & it never worked right again.
Like I have always said, if I even won the lotto I would bring out some nice compact cb radios
and if the factories told me they could not do it I would find one that would or I would open
my own electronics manufacturer & make the radios right here in Canada. They would the highest
quality rigs to be found.
Cheers.
Everything has a cost, now even more than ever. Sadly and most sincerely written companies were asked about it and if it can’t sell 5000 a month minimum over its life then nobody would invest.
So we say Xenon for example. Added SSB and offered to Stryker, Avanti, Team, Albrecht, Vector, CRT, K-PO and others. You’d need them all to share the cost of development, tooling costs, software etc. They for example all say not for me but Stryker says yes then he’s got all the costs and cannot be shared. OR worse still all say YES and then you have all brands with same stuff, albeit maybe different screen color. In 2021 the only company whose got the power to do this alone would be President but (for me) at this time when you can’t get chips easily I think nothing can happen. Factories are happy to make AMFM car radios.. Times they are changing and await next year with end user prices up 20-40% on some stuff less new will come and people will keep the old stuff or even older as prices will be prohibitive
That’s a great sounding portable radio. This is why I still don’t understand why radio manufactures can’t make an SSB cb the size of the CRT one or CRT Xenon. Obviously it can be done as proven by this radio which have a circuit board half the size of the radio I mentioned above.
Factories asked companies if they’d be interested to do this and split costs. Nobody interested. And to make it worth while you’d need sell 5000 pieces minimum a month, every single month.. The answer is the simplest in radio “nobody wanted pay for it” and are happy as things are.