[VE9KK] Guidance from Eric Swartz co-founder of Elecraft

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Guidance from Eric Swartz co-founder of Elecraft

Posted: 12 Feb 2021 11:13 AM PST
http://ve3wdm.blogspot.com/2021/02/guidance-from-eric-swartz-co-founder-of.html


As a follow-up post from my last post entitled "What has happened to
Elecraft" in that post I wrote how shocked I was when I visited Elecrafts
order page and the results, I had found. I was surprised to see the K3S had
been retired and the lack of availability of their other products. My post
had only been up for a short time until a comment from Eric Swartz WA6HHQ
who is the co-founder (Wayne Burdick N6KR being the other founder) of
Elecraft was posted. To be honest I was shocked and pleased to see that
Eric was a reader of the blog. I emailed Eric asking him if it was ok to
repost his response with a new post as some folks do not always read the
comments. I felt it to be very important to highlight Eric's response in a
post for all to see. He emailed me back and agreed without issue and below
is Eric's comment.


Hi Mike,While the last year has been challenging due to the Covid crisis,
the CA wildfires near us and related supply issues, we are not now shut
down by CA for COVID and are financially healthy. We are alive and kicking
- shipping radios, amplifiers and accessories every week.You mentioned the
backlog on the KX2, KX3, KXPA100 and K2, for which I apologize. All of
these are still in production and shipping. Orders for all of our products
surprisingly have been much higher than we expected during the Covid
crisis, which has contributed to the current backlog on these products. (It
looks like hams had more time this past year to enjoy the hobby, which has
helped sales!) I just checked our shipping report for the first ten days of
this month (through today 2/10) and all of these are shipping along with
their accessories, the KPA500, KPA1500 etc. We certainly have seen
intermittent production delays due to parts shortages, but to date, nothing
has shut us down. We've gotten pretty good at quickly finding alternate
parts when one is delayed.I see you were disappointed the K3S was no longer
in production. We formally discontinued it in May of 2019 when we
introduced the K4, after a close to 13 year run for the K3 and K3S. We've
also previously discontinued the K1 and KX1, which also had a long run. In
general, we discontinue products as sales decrease over time and when new
products replace them. Fortunately, we've been able to continue production
of the K2 since its first ship in Jan of 1999. No that's a long run :-)We
are also ramping up production and shipments of the K4, which also competes
for production resources. I noted in my recent live video Q&A session on
the K4 that we had just received 100 full PC board sets for the K4 from our
local assembly subcontractor and these are winding their way through
production. (See the Elecraft YouTube channel for the Zoom recording.) We
received a huge response to the K4 and as a result, have a very large
number of backorders that will keep us busy and financially healthy for
some time.Lastly, you mentioned the 'TBD' on K3S option boards and
accessories. We recently asked for interest from our customers on a special
run of all of these and received a very large response, which makes it
economical to build another run of most of these. We've now received the
quote updates from our suppliers and we will be contacting everyone
starting next week who expressed interest in these items.We're still in
business, healthy and enjoying designing and building exciting products for
the amateur radio community, and we hope to continue doing so for some
time!73, Eric - WA6HHQ