Guess it's time for me to chime in and update.
The news that Scott pulled from my website was written on January 25, three days after my wife passed away,
so I feel it necessary to re-visit the subject and provide a more detailed explanation. And thank you again to the many folks that responded to Scott's call to help me at that time. The financial boost was much needed and appreciated, and I am now closer to getting refocused and back into business.
Some comments about mesh antennas have been made by a few that may not fully understand the logistics and economics of running a manufacturing operation. SAMI did NOT go out of business because of the high cost of American labor. They're in rural Arkansas, and had a small but well trained staff that they pulled together whenever they needed to make a production run. The failure of the general public to support the C-band business made it next to impossible for them to keep the antenna production a full time concern. Only when a large order (by large, I mean maybe 50 to 100 antennas from one customer) was secured, they quickly mobilized, ordered steel and aluminum materials, and geared up for that production run, and added a few antennas to put into general inventory. Towards the end, this happened maybe 3 or 4 times a year. It became more trouble that it was worth to make a decent profit, even with multiple price increases during their final years of operation.
Words of advice to anyone considering importing mesh antennas from China. Watch out! If you think back to how American manufacturers of C-band antennas went out of business one by one, you will find that the companies that were making only four piece sectional antennas closed their doors first. Orbitron survived well until KTI bought them, and discontinued the Orbitron line of knock-down type antennas that had to be assembled like an erector set and then the mesh installed afterwards, on site. KTI had their own lighter-weight version, which they ended up having SAMI manufacture on their behalf, in addition to the normal SAMI line of sectional antennas. Once KTI closed their doors, SAMI was on its own, and they found that economics dictated that the knockdown type of antenna was much more profitable, especially if you had to ship them one at a time to individual customers. UPS, FedEx and the Post Office will generally NOT transport sectional antennas because they are too large in the packaging department. Anyone contemplating sectional antennas from China will find this out in a hurry. You can get about three times as many knockdown antennas into a shipping container as you can sectional types (based upon Orbitron experience shipping 8.5, 10 and 12 footers to the Middle East in the 1990s). Therefore, you would be foolish to import an often poorly made Chinese sectional antenna that may seem cheap---freight costs will kill you once you need to re-ship to a customer.
Orbitron and KTI spent a lot of time in researching the proper way to build a knockdown type antenna. Individual ribs must be produced with an accurate curve, with tight specifications for drilling holes. The tooling to make these types of antennas is very expensive. Aluminum extrusions must be bent perfectly to match the curve required for an accurate parabola. This is something that we had perfected when such antennas were made in North America.
Even with slightly higher labor costs here, a Chinese company will struggle to get this done correctly, and then there is the cost of shipping all of this material across the ocean. Quality control is a real issue, as is environmentally sound practices of painting the mesh. All are of great concern when choosing whether to manufacture here or there.
As explained about 7 weeks ago, the person that purchased all of the manufacturing tooling that was from SAMI did not store it properly, and a critical machine that made expanded aluminum mesh from solid coils of aluminum stock was left outdoors for 2 years without any weather protection. Independent inspection tells us that even if that machine could be repaired, it may never operate with the reliability necessary to trust it for commercial use.
Since this discussion, we have thought about alternative ways to make mesh antennas. Aluminum mesh can be purchased (at a higher cost) domestically. It has to be cut into accurate segments and also has to be painted.
These two factors will add costs to the process, and do not help make an economic case to do this. We are also trying to see what we can do by putting together the other parts from independent sources. Certain pieces of a knockdown antenna have previously used expensive tooling (such as the punched "finger" plate to keep ribs aligned between the front and back center plates). How to duplicate that without breaking the bank. All of this needs to get to the painting booth.
Suppose that you want galvanizing done on a mount. I found out that there is one remaining facility near Chicago. It's a nasty toxic process that is getting regulated out of business as facilities close, and they are getting a lot more for their work now.
In a nutshell, we are still considering the idea of mesh antennas, but have to fight an uphill battle to do it right, in addition to financing. It is not a get rich quick business, and has an uncertain future, given new competition from Internet delivery, which is starting to replace satellite in most new startup applications.
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