On Jan 27, 10:13*am, Channel Jumper Channel.Jumper.
wrote:
The world worked just fine on tubes for some 70 years, before some wise
guy came along and decided that they were bad and that they could make
something better.

In fact, tubes has a service life.
Lets say the life of a properly cared for tube is about 40,000 hours.
Little things like turning off the radio and turning it back on again
and not letting the tubes properly warm up - were detrimental to tube
life.
You maybe got 15,000 hours out of a tube before its effectiveness began
to fade.

Tubes do not like to be stored in a cold place and they do not like to
be dormant. *A old tube - still in the box isn't always a good tube,
even when properly tested. * You go to ham radio swap meets all the time
and there is always someone there that collects tubes and has bins full
of them.
You get all excited because they have the tube you are looking for, only
to bring it home and it doesn't work as well as the original tube the
radio came with. * That is because the tube is old and the tubes life
has been reduced by the way it was stored. * It needs to be used at
least once every 12 months, 6 would be even better.

People wants everything now and they don't want to wait for the tubes to
warm up to talk on their nets. * They want to turn the radio on, say
their call sign and no traffic and turn the radio off.
The drive for a miniaturized 12 volt mobile radio was the reason why the
transistorized radio became so popular.

You need to remember that all this radio crap comes from Japan and China
and Korea and third world countries for a reason, and the reason why
radios were not improved sooner was all due to the US government.

From the 1960's when President Kennedy said we are going to put a man on
the moon, the US Missile program consumed all of the transistors
produced in the USA from that point right up to the 1990's.
By that time, the foreign markets had already monopolized the market to
the point of where no one else could enter it competitively.
About the only mass produced equipment made in the USA that was even
close was probably the Heath Kit stuff and other radio manufacturers of
the day.

Even Motorola tried to get into the Ham radio market not too long ago
and they only produced one or two models of radio, before they realized
that the cost of production was so high that they could not be
competitive and they quickly got out of it.

Back in the day, a relative of mine worked for GE.
GE made some of the best radio equipment out there, including the Mastr
II repeaters. *If you listen to the old recordings of the Apollo
program, you will hear the little beeps between transmissions. * Then
you listen to your local repeater and you hear the same little beeps -
why - because that repeater was a GE series repeater which was
re-purposed *to be used for amateur radios.

GE was electronically correct.
Motorola was politically correct.

GE built things that worked, their motto was - we bring good things to
life.
Motorola crossed all the T's and dotted all the I's and they ended up
being the company which the US Government called upon to produce the
equipment they wished to purchase.
It wasn't because the Motorola stuff was better, just because they knew
how to do business in the USA.
Make it good, make it cheap and pay the graft and corruption money and
keep your mouth shut.
If you sell a $50,000.00 radio unit to a local government, you need to
bid it at $65,000.00
Install it for $50,000.00 and kick back $10,000.00 to the local
officials to get the contract.
That is the reason why our country is so broke today and the reason why
government officials spends millions of dollars to get a job which pays
$150,000.00 or less per a year.

--
Channel Jumper

Some of this is true and some of this is bull****.

GE is a cancerous megamonolith that needs breaking up into many
smaller pieces. That said they did, and still build a few halfway
decent things, like jet engines and locomotives, but most of their
consumer stuff was always ****. With a few specific exceptions.

The missile program never did consume all or even a majority of US
semiconductor output. They did wind up spoiling the semiconductor
houses badly, but when Apollo and Vietnam wound down they were in
serious trouble. The Japanese had the market for linear analog parts
by the balls, and they were selling most of it not as parts but in
consumer products, often at prices designed to undercut the US
industry. The US semi houses had to go into digital and
microprocessors and this turned out to be financially smart for them,
a big win for Intel in the long run and Motorola for a while too.

The mass market does not care about radios per se. I am talking here
about a small niche market.