K3 Status Update - 10/17/2007

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K3 Status Update - 10/17/2007

Eric Swartz - WA6HHQ
Administrator
Hi,

We've been receiving a flood of emails lately asking questions about K3 shipping
and what we're up to here in Aptos. I apologize that we can not reply to all of
them as we're totally focused on getting K3s out the door.

We are slowly ramping up in fits and starts and definitely have shipped more
than just one K3. :-) We'll ship for one day and then pause for a day or two to
make sure that everything is correct. We'll make small changes to the
manufacturing process and then ship some more etc. The last week was slower than
we wanted, mostly due to minor manufacturing glitches, delays printing the
manuals, making sure the boards were fully tested and getting a regular flow of
completed PCB assemblies (i.e. complete sets of boards) from our assembly
sub-contractor. They are finally coming up to speed and it looks like next week
will be the first time that they will be supplying more board sets to us than we
can digest and ship daily. That will allow us to get ahead on our testing of
boards in batches and to run our process more efficiently.

Most of the first shipments have gone out UPS ground and via Priority mail. I
think only one customer asked for it overnight, and that one went out today. As
a result many of them are just receiving their K3s now and may not start
building them until this weekend. The customers we've shipped to so far were
very early orders from Visalia etc. and we've been closely communicating with
them to make sure they received everything that was supposed to be there and
that there were no major problems building and getting the kit running. :-)
These are regular customers, but we are being very careful to make sure that we
do not ship a large number of K3s with infant problems (in the kit or printed
docs.) A number of them are bringing up their kits now and I expect you will see
more postings beginning next week. Just this morning we got news one of them is
100% up and running and very happy. Also remember than not all of our customers
are on the Elecraft list and some even do not use email. (Less than 50% of the
customers in our database are on the Elecraft list.)

So far we've been shipping just kits to keep everything under control. Next week
we will begin shipping some fully built rigs too. We brought up the first
factory built K3 today (that will ship to a customer who ordered it as the first
built K3 at Visalia) and it is fully functional, going through final burn-in and
test right now.

We're being careful and conservative - trying to make sure quality trumps
quantity in these early shipping days. In any case, I think we should see an
increase of K3 owner comments starting some time next week. (And more K3
shipments too!)

73, Eric   WA6HHQ
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