Well Thank You for the explaination but in reality lets just talk about a 40 channel ssb radio from lets say from 1980 compaired to a Galaxy 959. My old Lafayette worked fine from turn on to turn off no matter what the temp give or take 5 minutes, the Galaxy 959 that I had came from the factory off frequency cold or hot, once aligned it would be off for the first 10 or 15 minutes, work ok for about 15 minutes and if I talked a lot would go off frequency the other way, like just say it was high cold , ok warmed up then would go low when hot, none of my old radios do that, they might be just a tick high dead cold then go on and stay there on my usual channel 39 LSB. I do understand we paid 300 or more for those old SSB radios but they worked correctly, these newer mid range price radio work like poop and people still buy them. I have one of those Alpha 10 Max radios, it's dead on from cold to 110 degrees no matter what. Is it newer tech stuff or just the older parts were built with better tolerancees??
Ah, yes, the TRC449. Mine is still rock solid even after 30+ years. Best Uniden chassis ever made, IMHO.
As the cost of manufacturing goes up, the quality goes down. Those early radios were made in Japan, which by then had a mature electronics industry with a reputation for quality. Then the offshore competition came in from... Taiwan, Macao, Malaysia, The Philippines... It just became harder to compete with each newcomer. You have a set price-point and you have to meet it... so you too go "offshore". With each new competing country, you have new start-up rough spots and a learning curve.
That Galaxy 959 is probably made in China. Whats interesting is that for all intents and purposes, China is now a mature electronics industry for the most part. For the most part, most Chinese factories are producing excellent product. Except for the new start-ups, which have a learning curve, as well as competition from the older established factories.
Today, US distributors need to find cheaper and cheaper sources to make the same chassis (and dollars).
The Alpha 10 radios are made in a mature, established facility, using modern SMD technology, and modern uP based PLL circuits. Most of the Magnums, and some others are made in the
Goodwill Telecommunications Engineering Co. factory. The Alpha 10 Max and the "AnyTone AT5555" are made in the
Qixiang Telecom Co. factory. Both facilities are modern, up-to-date facilities which use SMD technology and uP-based PLL circuits. I believe that the latest Galaxies now are also made in the
Goodwill factories. But I suspect that at their price-point, cheaper parts or a cheaper design is now used. Not sure. And definitely not sure why a simple 40-channel SSB radio should drift? I would guess that the factories are cutting back on quality parts, to meet US price-points.
The only thing I can think of is that those radios already come broad-banded to accept "Viagra" boards, etc. Broad-banding contributes to drift, as the circuit "Q" and tolerances are lowered.
Oh, and one more thing... I know for a fact that the quality of the assembly workers in these factories is going down. My own OmegaForce S45HP came out of the factory with the FM discriminator poorly aligned, and the clarifier off set (on frequency = 11:00 position) which means that the frequency alignment was sloppy. This is due to poor training, or a very inexperienced calibration tech. (Luckily, I have the alignment instructions and set it right.) I'm seeing more and more poor alignment in many radios right out of the box.
