In the earliest news release about the new SStran5000 the price was forecast to be around $200
Phil is probably pretty busy.
It could take a day or two for him to get back to you.
I had contact with Phil a week or so ago. He says he's working on finishing up the printed manual which, of course, comes with the kits and must be done before they can start shipping.
Somebody said this before, but I want to say it again...
The manual for the AMT3000 is probably the most perfect manual that has come with a relatively small piece of equipment in years of experience. It celebrates the old style of detailed manual and schematic that once came only with professional broadcast gear.
What am I saying, the AMT3000 IS professional broadcast gear.
Since computers have made everyone a "technologist" the manuals have shrunk to single slips of paper or online PDF files with typographical errors and bad writing.
Consumer equipment once came with schematics, back in the tube days, but in more recent times the only way to get a schematic was to order a costly "service manual," and those were usually very blunt and to the point without much text.
A major name multi-meter I just purchased came with a tiny multi-linqual manual smaller than a checkbook, with such brief descriptions that parts of the meter are a mystery to me.
Other small manuals with radios and computer devices often have complicated iconic symbols in place of words and somewhat mixed up instructions about pressing this, that and the other, in order to do such and such, and I think that kind of equipment never becomes familiar to the user.
The Part15.us Award this year for Best Manual goes to SStran!
It is true that Phil's instruction manual for
the AMT-3000 is wonderful, and it gave
me the confidence I needed to build the
transmitter. Contrast that with some other
operating manuals. I have a few cheap MP3
players that I bought at the drug store. I
got them just to experiment with. The manuals
are so bad it is a crime. Too too small and
with instructions that are completely incorrect!
Phil is probably already flooded with requests for
the AMT-5000. I know he wants to do things
exactly right. So if he needs more time, that's OK
with me.
I'm sure whatever he decides to charge for the
AMT-5000 - whatever it is, I'm sure it will be
worth every cent.
Bruce, Dog Radio Studio 2
well phil let me pre order amt5k. paid 229.95, schematic is included in manual 🙂
so i will be owning one of the first 100 amt 5000's
well see how it compares to the other part 15 of similar design
Excellent! Good for you!
Bruce, Dog Radio Studio 2
Will others be allowed to pre order also?
If you look back up-thread, I had asked earlier. ITMT, I had emailed Phil B in between and he indicated at that time he wasn't taking pre-release orders until he had worked out the manual, due to time constraints ... IOW the manual had to take priority and handling orders was apparently something he wasn't comfortable with at that time.
I reckon we'll have to hear from the man himself .... Phil? ... Phil? ... (tap-tap-tap) Is this thing on?
he takes payments via paypal so thats really a accepts payments and forget it till your ready to ship thing as all the info for each buyer is in each paypal transaction for review when product is ready to ship.
count down to D-Day 🙂 can't wait till phil starts shipping. it's like waiting for christmas day to come so i can open my presents. anxious to see how this thing is made and how it operates lol.
check sstran daily for any updates.
Sounds like the unit will make a big "SPLAT-SPLASH" for the Part 15 world. Congrats!
However let me inject a little creative criticism here.
For years people have been begging for a low power AM tx capable of C-QUAM stereo. Now we all know of ASMAX and C-CUFF stuff...both of which are excellent units and produce one hell of a stereo audio signal.
Isn't it time..and long LONG overdue that a low power AM transmitter kit for the low budget market feature C-QUAM capability? After all....HD radios are abundant these days and practically all of them are capable of receiving the AM C-QUAM format...so why not 'OPEN THE FLOOD GATES" of bandwidth allowed for AM and kick in the modern age of stereo in the 21st century?!!
Given the price...I think this new AMT5000 should have it...considering the price of the other two I mentioned earlier are less than the proposed 300 price tag of this new mono unit.
But great to hear about another new unit being introduced onto the Part 15 market.
All the best wishes and success to the new unit!
RFB
In 1959 I was lucky enough to be on duty at an FM station that was doing an experiment in co-operation with a separately owned AM station. The AM station ran the announcer/host and sent the left channel of a stereo record. The FM station where I worked carried the right channel from the stereo record. That was the first radio stereo, as FM stereo had not yet been introduced. In fact, stereo LPs were only a few years old.
Stereo FM followed about a year later and had a large part in wide popular acceptance of FM radio by the mass public. Later on, as the ad money was moving away from AM, stereo AM was an attempt to balance the game, but flopped, partly because there were several incompatible systems and the technology was "left to the market place."
In all that time I was evolving as an opinion center and came to the conclusion that the human voice was a monaural instrument, and was best suited to a mono medium, typically AM or shortwave radio. The spoken voice sounds less intimate if the room or background acoustics become a distractive element in a stereophonic setting. Therefore my AM stations always will be mono, as I'm big on human speech communication.
But stereo is there for AM stations that wish to add that feature, and in response to RFB's comment, what about a modification kit so that the existing part 15 transmitters can be rigged for stereo by the interested owner? I would think that the market for low power AM stereo transmitters is a minority market, and that the manufacturers would take a loss by developing and stocking a stereo transmitter, but a project diagram is an interesting idea.
Just as we developed a 3-stage shortwave transmitter right here on the website (Big Talker), the design engineers, RFB being very much a design engineer who might well lead the effort, could invent a set of instructions for the stereo crowd.
I have never ran across a single soul on the island who has listened to C-QUAM stereo. And neither have I. Just a statement for your consideration.
i have a be ax 10 commercial synthesized cquam exciter i will be using to drive phils transmitter when setup properly phils new transmitter suppose to have a 20khz 3db rf bandwidth which is sufficient for cquam.