Many of you know Ten Tec was acquired by RF Concepts who liquidated most of Ten Tec’s production assets such as the circuit board assembly equipment as well as the tool and die, machine, plastic injection molding and sheet metal shops. They shifted everything to a complete outsourcing model and ran fire sale and liquidation pricing, squeezing Ten Tec like a big, fat orange until there wasn’t even any pulp left, then declared bankruptcy leaving the remaining assets to RKR which was formed as what appeared to be a debt liquidation company. There were some IP issues which opened a dialog between N8WFF and the owners who indicated they just wanted a way to recover some of their money and had no interest in ham radio business. They were about to auction everything off at Ten Tec because it was too far away to deal with. I loved Ten Tec and believed in Ten Tec so against better judgement I offered to purchase the entire thing as it was. Jan 1, 2016, Ten Tec officially became a subsidiary of Dishtronix, Inc. Every radio that could be built from parts had been built and there was no money to buy new parts because creditors would not have anything to do with Ten Tec. Fortunately, I had cash to put in to bail out their unfulfilled commercial contracts which enabled me to get Ten Tec back to an operational status. I also started repairing the backlog of radios that had been sitting a couple of years there and got all of them back to their owners. I kept repairing radios usually for a couple of hundred dollars, a loss
when you consider a Tech might work two or three days on some of them, and started supplying parts again, also at a loss, just to support the good will of the Ten Tec customer base. It was OK because I was making money in other areas which I could subsidize the ham radio customers. I managed to get RX340 and RX331 production restarted and had just begun with the introduction of the Omni VII+. I had successfully cleaned up the mess that was Ten Tec and had them on stable financial footing. Then COVID hit and the rug was pulled completely out from under us. One of the chip factories burned down and without those chips we were unable to build new radios as we had intended. I was faced with a real dilemma. Completely redesign existing radios with the obstacle of not having the original team, having to used antiquated and poor performing layout software and to rewrite man years of code using obsolete and unsupported development environments which were no longer available – OR – do a new radio.
I procrastinated for a time expecting the parts shortages would solve itself. It did not, however. Ham radio is a very small and insignificant, even nonexistent market as far as chip makers are concerned. For many years we benefited from and built on the chips developed for analog cell phones and analog television. When those industries went digital, the demand for analog mixers and IF chips dried up. Further when televisions and monitors went to LCD the high voltage market of capacitors, etc. dried up. The manufacturers saw COVID as an excuse to purge all unprofitable components from their catalog and that is exactly what they did. Not only were the parts we needed not coming back, they are NEVER coming back. Redesign is the only choice left.
I decided rather than to try to reinvent the past to go with something new. During all this transitioning, someone from Europe approached me about a partnership for a new short
wave radio he was developing. I was very impressed but found that he was actually the marketing guy and not the technical guy who actually developed the radio. Those two eventually parted ways and the connection went silent. A year or two later, I don’t exactly remember when, Konstantine, the technical guy, contacted me about a potential partnership on a new kit he had developed. It was very impressive and really a work of art considering one man had done most of it. We had long discussions about what it would take to become a Ten Tec and many technical exchanges under non-disclosure, etc. Unfortunately, we couldn’t reach an agreement that would work for everyone, and we agreed to just disagree on some things and lost touch. I could clearly see that war was coming and that it would be brutal and tried to warn Konstantine to get out, but he dismissed it saying this sort of thing happens all the time. War came and the connection went silent for a long time. Then one day, I received information from my friend telling me he was hiding in the forest outside Kiev, and that the war was far worse than the news media was telling us. Graveyards were overflowing with no one to bury the dead and any man under 65 was being abducted right off the street and pressed into trench warfare at the tip of a gun in his back. He didn’t want all his work to just disappear and said I was the one person he knew who understood and appreciated all that he had done, and was deserving because I was ethical and had not stolen from him, and did I want it for free to carry on, yes or no? I of course accepted but said “Why didn’t you let me know sooner? Maybe I can help...”, He had also sent me a picture of his family and absolutely adorable 5 year old daughter. I made my mind up right then and there that this adorable little child wasn’t going to grow up without a daddy in a hell hole, because you know what happens to children in that situation.
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| Front panel layout prototype |
I mobilized every resource I had. Making phone calls to people in places that might help. We planned extraction missions by sea and by air, but how do you extract a 5 year old underwater? In the end he filed some special paperwork, and it took a long time to get approved. Maybe some of my calls helped with that. I started a prayer chain too and there were MANY hams praying for that family to be delivered. Eventually he got approval to leave. On the day he got to the border the papers didn’t help. The crossing guards held him up for almost 8 hours and were not going to let him out. Then a miracle happened. The guards started acting like they were drunk and confused and couldn’t understand what was going on. One of those frustrated, dazed and confused guards waved to him and he was across the border family and all! I later told him what had happened, that the power of so many prayers moved the Holy Spirit to confuse those guards and let his family cross. Anyone reading, scoff if you will but never doubt the power of the Holy Trinity. Today that little girl and her family are doing just fine. My motivations are not to become rich or build an empire, but to be able to help those who really need it, because I know first hand what it is like to want help and to need help and for no one to be there. We can’t take material wealth to the grave. Wealth however IS a tool we can use to help other people with. What we do take is what we learn from one another by helping each other. I could make a lot more money using my skills to make things to kill each other with, but I prefer to make things that can help each other and that make each other happy. That is the spirit behind the Phoenix – to make a positive difference and we hope you will use it that way. As an engineer I hope to leave the world a better place than I found it.
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| Front panel engineering prototype |
With my friend safe we decided to do a new radio using what he has accomplished as a starting point and Phoenix was born. We decided to develop an entirely new what Ten Tec calls the SPU (Signal Processing Unit) which is a plug in DSP module utilizing a quad core ARM processor operating at 1.3 GHZ with integral DSP cores and GPUs, 1GB RAM, 32GB EMMC memory, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 1GB Ethernet PHY, HD HDMI, etc. A new front panel layout was done as well as a new display carrier with a native 1920 x 1280 High Definition AMMOLED (similar to OLED) display. The ADC and FPGA were modified to be a dual channel system. N8WFF has designed a new version of the Orion II preselectors and a new transmit power amplifier chain based on the Eagle. Low pass filters and antenna tuner from the Eagle are adopted as well as the VFO knob, while Argonaut 6 knobs help on the concentric controls with construction and distribution techniques from the Omni 7+. We took the best that Ten Tec ever did in anything that I could use and joined it with what is probably the most technologically intense signal processing unit ever built for a civilian radio, and we present it to you as the Phoenix. Named in authentic Ten Tec fashion for the Greek mythological Fire Bird which rose from the ashes to rebirth, just as Ten Tec is relaunching after all the unfortunate events of the last near decade. We, the designers and builders of the Phoenix feel we have delivered something as powerful, or more powerful than any of our competitors in a form factor smaller and lighter than theirs and at a significantly lower price. It is fast, it is beautiful, and it sounds good. It is also fully remotable right out of the box with nothing to add.
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| Rear panel engineering prototype |
When you buy a Ten Tec you are not just buying a radio, you are helping fund our mission to help those in need, to assist those less fortunate, to offer a hand up, not a handout to anyone needing it. We manufacture everything, circuit board assembly etc. in our own facility that we own and improve with lots of power necessary for manufacturing and proper antistatic flooring and other facilities necessary to really do the job right. Before Ten Tec was liquidated, we made metal cabinets for most of the products in ham radio, and we endeavor to bring that back offering manufacture of circuit boards up to finished products and distribution for hams with a dream of a product but no way to get it too market. We support America First, pro First Amendment, backed and guaranteed by the Second Amendment. I am the guy who developed and brought you high power legal limit plus reliable solid-state amplifiers over two decades ago with my Prometheus DX2400L1 amplifier and the Hermes board which became the basis for the Apache Labs SDR which was my concept, but I was not allowed to work on it because I was a commercial guy. With your backing and my new facility in Dayton I will be able to bring more new technology to ham radio. I work with the best engineers in the world because they reach out and find me and find a home for kindred spirits, a place where exceptional talent is appreciated and encouraged instead of suppressed. If we can’t give you something better, why would we bother? We have stiff competition from the Japanese and Chinese with their near infinite funding. It is up to you, the customer to decide who shall lead the communications technology race. Without your funding we can’t compete and will go away. It is that simple. When you buy a Ten Tec, you bring our next generation radios that much closer to reality while getting a solid performer you can use daily in your station. Ten Tec has a long history of innovation and bringing you technical firsts and with your support we will continue to do so. I’ve come this far with no financial backing or support. Imagine what I might do with 100 of you behind me, or 1000 of you, or 10,000 of you. What kind of difference could Ten Tec make then?
Ten-Tec web: MODEL 594 PHOENIX - coming soon
Ten-Tec at Hamvention 2025: Phoenix 594 at Hamvention 2025
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