Greetings from the mothership. Q: Are Eric and I keeping up with the K4 megathreads on the forums? A: You bet.
But we're not weighing in as often as we normally would. On the one hand, it's affirming as a small company to be at the eye of a storm of anxious demand. On the other hand we really feel your pain. On the third hand (we need three these days), we're both seriously overworked trying to ramp up production. A radio with this many features and so much new tech -- the coolness factor -- comes with a lot of new assembly and test procedures. A whole lot of invention. New tricks we didn't know we had to learn. Over the past week alone our manufacturing engineering team probably shaved 50% off the total time per unit. For me, it's feast/famine. I have serial #00002 on my workbench and use it every day. Every day there's new and improved software to be played with and thoroughly vetted. That's the fun part. But I also spend hours daily optimizing interaction between the K4's multiple processors, evolving faster ways to do alignment/test, and helping our software team work through a long wish-list of new capabilities. The work can be tedious. Still, every evening when the team finally knocks off (and I do mean every evening, including most weekends), I get another chance to be a kid in the candy store. This rig's just so much fun to operate. And I'm confident that for every new K4 that comes off the line ready for its first test drive, there's an operator who'll experience the same feeling I do. Despite the K4's advanced circuitry, I'm always reminded of my very first efforts at home-brew, when I was maybe 15. Discovery. Tweaking. From raw parts with their leads twisted together to prototypes only a mother could love to finished product to that first demo at a club meeting. It's much the same now, though the parts are smaller, the tools more exotic, and the stakes higher. What I can promise is that we're putting everything we have into the K4, like we have with every product over the past 20 years. We can't wait to get them into your hands, and hear the smiles behind the mics and keys. 73, Wayne N6KR ______________________________________________________________ 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
