HamGadgets News

I’ve been having a heck of a time nailing down a reliable supply of the pushbutton switches used in the MK-1, and it’s been causing me unimaginable headaches.  Although most distributors supposedly carry the part — manufactured by a huge Japanese company — trying to find anyone who actually has them in stock has been hit or miss.  Mostly miss.  Not a single distributor has had any in well over a month now, or I would have bought every one of them.  I have not had a delivery of switches since January, and those I “lucked” into.  So, for the past week and a half I’ve been sitting here awaiting the delivery of a backordered batch that was supposed to ship from the distributor on the 16th.

I finally have shipping confirmation, and the parts will be here late Friday afternoon.  That means I’ll have my backorders cleared out again by Saturday afternoon, and will have sufficient stock to carry me through Dayton at least.  I have also placed long term purchase orders for enough cabinets and circuit boards that we should be good for the rest of the year without any further backorder situations.  Thanks to those patient folks who have had to wait for their MasterKeyers — the wait is almost over, and hopefully we won’t see that again!

I’ve been selling PicoKeyer and ID-O-Matic kits on eBay for several years now, with generally good results.  They’ve sold fairly well, though to be perfectly honest I have no idea why.  It costs more, because I’ve got to cover the eBay listing fees and final value fees.  But, for whatever reason, I’ve had a lot of people buy from eBay auctions rather than ordering directly from the web site.

On March 30, eBay is once again raising its fees.  I’m done — I won’t be listing any more kits on eBay.  It’s gone far enough, and I’m not willing to be a part of making people pay more than they need to for kits.  It’s bad enough that they pretty much killed off any payment methods other than their own PayPal, but now the fees have just gotten out of hand.

I did some work on the web site over the weekend.  You can now place an order without creating an account, which should make some folks happier.  This means one less password to remember, of course.  it also means no email updates, newsletters or order history, but that is an acceptable tradeoff for a lot of people.

I’m doing a little more cleanup and some minor changes from time to tiem, so if you get our “Out to Lunch” page, check back again in a couple of hours.

If you have an ID-O-Matic II, please check for an updated manual.  The original version (100227) had a couple of errors.  The schematic diagram was incorrect, and the table on p. 5-6 showing the terminal block connections was wrong.  The corrected manual is here.  My apologies for any confusion.

We will once again be at Dayton in May 2010.  We’re in booth BA0482, right down the aisle a bit from ARRL and not far from Begali, Marconi and QCWA.  Be sure to stop by and say hello!  Of course we’ll have plenty of kits and MasterKeyers on hand, as well as some yet-to-be-determined Dayton specials.

After a 17-hour day on Saturday and another 8 hours on Sunday, I now have all of the ID-O-Matic II backorders filled and shipped.  I also have all orders placed while I was gone last week on their way.  As of this morning I’m current on all shipping, just waiting on the MasterKeyer boards so I can start shipping those.  With any luck I’ll have all of those cleared out by the end of the week as well.

So…  as of now, we’re back to normal.  If you place an order for anything other than a MasterKeyer it will be shipped within a day or so as usual.  MK-1 orders will ship in the order they were received, starting later this week.