I'm not sure what Les wrote about the cost of the product, but my understanding was that there was a temporary $60 price associated with RFSM8000 from the normal price.
The question is: who will buy it at any price? If you have seen what has happened to other developers who tried to charge for their products, some of them having excellent value, they simply failed to find a market. In fact, I would be hard pressed to come up with any new ham software products in recent time that have taken off and been purchased by many hams. Consider programs such as the paperchaser log which was a niche logging program. After a few years the author discontinued the product because he only had a few buyers. I sure would not want to have been one of those buyers. But I nearly was as it looked like a very good program! Imagine someone buying such a program that t is now free, but worse, it is no longer been developed or supported. I suspect the same thing happened with the emergency group that thought they were going to be able to charge $50 per seat for their emergency program. I don't think it succeeded. But others have gone on to develop similar programs at no charge. But even those programs are not heavily used either. There is a limited amount of mindshare with all this technology and many of us are on overload as it is. (Not only for ham programs, but the hundreds of competing programs and even operating systems which are open source or at least free as in beer). I am now using an astronomy program that is completely free and that is as good as what you used to have to pay $50 to $100 for just a few years ago. The Open Office Suite has made it possible to avoid buying the MS Office Suite saving at least $500. I do not consider this a bad thing at all. It makes more software available to more people and equalizes the power to everyone and not just those with a lot of money. Where the RFSM8000 type of product seems to have the greatest value is in the commercial market. Assuming that it can compete with multi thousand dollar STANAG modems, it should be an excellent buy for those who use this technology. I know that I probably speak for a majority of hams who wish them well. As I have said many times, what I am looking for is a program that provides ARQ chat that can operate under the worst possible conditions and can also scale if conditions warrant so that I can send any data that I am interested in sending and is legal to use in my country. The technology has been invented to do slow, medium, and fast speeds (1000 wpm text data) depending upon the conditions, but no one has been able to put this together in a simple to use package that will appeal to the mainstream digital ham. I believe the best approach, and I see some are talking about this lately, are programs that are modular and you can bolt on various parts and not have to reinvent the wheel over and over with each new mode. 73, Rick, KV9U dmitry_d2d wrote: > Hi Les, Rick and all. > > About prices of RFSM-8000. > I'm sorry, but Les was wrote incorrect information. > In January, we offer special low prices. > Price of FULL Featured (with Mail-Server) version is 60 USD (only for > HAMs). > Mail-Client version is unavailable. > And, we think, this action (special low prices for HAMs) will be > continued - in February and more. > Please, see our web-page for last correct information: > http://rfsm2400.radioscanner.ru > > 73, > Dmitry (RFSM-IDE Group). > > > > Announce your digital presence via our Interactive Sked Page at > http://www.obriensweb.com/sked > > > DRCC contest info : http://www.obriensweb.com/drcc.htm > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > > > >
