Hmmmm, not my experience at all with M2. My 2MCP14 and 436CP30, along with their accessory polarization switches, and 2m and 432 egg beater antennas all met the dimensional specs and apparent operational characteristics. Robert KR7O in sales and Matt on the technical side were always very helpful and responsive to my calls and e-mails.
Sometimes you’ll find that suppliers will have antennas in stock (got all my stuff from DXEngineering, another great experience BTW) where they actually may be out of stock and simply in new production at the factory.
Guess we’ve nailed down the ends of the bell curve on experience with M2; I’ll buy from them again when I build my weak-signal arrays and probably their HF LPA as well.
Of course YMMV.
73 - Dino KL0S
On Sep102014, at 2352 PM, Lizeth Norman normanlizeth@gmail.com wrote:
If you're buying anything from M2 expect poor customer service and a bad build. I have more to do tonight than list the screwups those people have done. They actually charged my credit card and THEN 2.5 months later (after finishing another manufacturing cycle) shipped the product (upgrade kit for a KLM kt-34a)!!! Not to mention having to use a dremel on the "CNC" hardware. The UHF antennas use a cheap white plastic insulator that cracks, allowing water ingress. Remember the $200 circularity switch that you need to buy? Junk after 7 years. See here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/n3ykf/11312549334/ Considering what these people charge, I'd expect teflon.
Because I'm a glutton for punishment, I purchased another antenna from this bunch of rejects (These bozos actually had the balls to cancel two credit card orders for parts!). It was cheaper than ordering one from Europe. I guess at $800, lasting 7 years, it's just over $100 a year to use this, then throw it away.
The antenna has 21 pair of elements. 14 pair (!!!!!!) were miscut. 13 by 1/16 and one by an 1/8. (I took pictures because I care!!!) That's a real problem where the elements of the antenna are 1/16 th of an inch different (most). Took me almost two hours to verify what they'd done and decide that regardless of what screwups they'd made, it was going together. Seems to work. I've no way to test it other than swr and on air usage.
Take care to read the Gulf Alpha page. Last I looked, the satellite antennas were out of production and he was reserving parts/service for original owners, only.
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 4:23 PM, Dave Webb KB1PVH kb1pvh@gmail.com wrote:
Keith,
I'm not sure if Gulf Alpha is still making the satellite antennas. He had something on his website saying that he wasn't going to build them and even if he was to build them, you will wait a minimum of 4 months regardless of what timeframe he tells you.
Dave-KB1PVH
Sent from my Samsung S4