Amateur Radio Products - WTF?

Let's make a couple of assumptions about you, dear reader.

You are a licensed amateur radio operator, who has undergone at least some basic training, and passed some form of examination.

You can use a pair of scissors, and do some basic soldering.

To that extent, I don't think I'm likely to be very far wrong.

Why is it, then, that in the latest pages of RadCom, as many other magazines, we skilled people are offered products that are both extraordinarily simple and fantastically expensive?

By this, I don't mean some kind of transceiver that needs some thought and a list of components.  I mean a simple wire antenna.  There's an end-fed wire in there - something you can make possessing almost no skill and some ice-cream pocket money - selling for £160!

Then we have yet another small ('magnetic') loop offering to add to the very many already hoping to make a killing from the dumb operator who thinks there's some magic in their making.  A piece of coax and a capacitor in a box (no, it's not even a remote tune version) - oh, and a tripod and 'field' bag - going for just under £300 (or just under £400, if you want the lower band coverage!)

From all-new materials, plus an E-bay capacitor, my latest loop cost maybe £50, with the very distinct advantage of a much more physically stable and efficient radiator in the form of wide-bore copper tube. True, it won't fold down into a bag, but it can be made car-portable.  For real 'wild operating', I'd always backpack a much more effective quarter wave wire rather than a magloop, any day.

Sure, there are always people who are simply too nervous, short of time, or plain dumb enough to buy things you can knock-up for pin money from scrap bits of wire.  But the hobby can come to suffer from offering far too many simple things for too much money.

For one, it generates the impression that there is some justification - other than simply profit-making - for those high prices.  Magnetic loops fall into this category, with talk of 'lethal voltages' and 'kilovolt breakdown values' for capacitors.  Yet, they are as easy to make and safe to operate as a dipole.  Someone, somewhere aided by the internet, has decided that only the superhuman can build an effective loop, and that you will die if you try to do it yourself.

The other side is that, through the endless and profitable search for advertising income, hobby magazines come to be full of advertisements for things we don't need to buy, and portray a hobby that is too expensive for today's already debt-ridden society.  Advertising rates are very high for those places where you're likely to take notice of them, meaning that the most expensive gee-whizzery gets all the prominence.

Of course, just about all magazines are advertising outlets, padded-out with the odd article (and not the other way around), simply because, without the adverts, those magazine wouldn't exist - despite their increasingly and alarmingly-high cover price; it's not uncommon now to find magazines costing £10 on the news stands.

Wouldn't it be nice, instead, to see magazines full of cheap component sellers, padded-out with 'DIY' articles, rather than purveyors of ready-made £160 end-fed wires and £5000-plus transceivers?  Well, we can hope...