The notion of a premium transceiver emerged over the past fifty years in amateur radio manufacturing. In many ways, it mirrored the general consumer marketplace. A leading brand analysis company says the following:
But consumers consider these products as being more than just about price. And, it varies by generation, too. NielsenIQ says that the identification of attributes make a product “premium,” a majority (54%) from around the world mentioned its high-quality materials or ingredients, while another 46% pointed to it offering superior function or performance.
Less than one-third (31%) said that a “premium” product is defined by being expensive. Instead, the product having a superior design (38%), coming from a well-known or trusted brand (38%) and offering or doing something no other product provides (37%) are more likely to be associated with the term “premium,” says the NielsenIQ study.
These specific definitions might also be changing. NielsenIQ looked at how Millennials (21-34) and Boomers (50-64) define “premium.” Baby Boomers are more likely to point to high-quality materials and also rank its uniqueness relatively higher while Millennials are more apt to cite superior customer service and scarcity as premium products. As Boomers may only have another 10-15 years of primary activity in the hobby, these different perceptions of premium products could bode change in the offing in the near future.
In amateur radio, the market for HF transceivers has a folklore of a premium rig since the days of Art Collins and his revered line of Collins radios. It’s often read that “rich hams” bought Collins but “smart hams” bought Drake radios. This suggests that while the price was higher for Collins radios, the performance was about the same as the comparable Drake ones. A former ARRL staff member (now SK), Stan Gibilisco W1GV made the argument in this Youtube video:
Over the past few decades, there has been a growing variety of price-points of HF transceivers, both at the high end as well as the low end. We may have the greatest diversity in market-entry price points for HF ever. What are the patterns through which this differentiated set of rig prices at market-entry emerged over time? What company “invented” the premium HF transceiver? Was there a follow-up race to the top in premium pricing?
Focusing on the high-end premium rig, I use the Sherwood Table list of transceivers to answer this question. (Receivers were omitted here.) Attaching to each transceiver the year of market-entry and the manufacturers suggested price adjusted to 2021 US dollars, I’ve selected the highest priced radio by manufacturer within a consistent set of five-year periods. A table of these results are shown below, sorted by period, year, and manufacturer. The rig is identified as well. I chose the highest priced radio for each manufacturer instead of the quoted 20% above market average because the market itself varied over the decades. Thus, surely the highest priced radio offered by a manufacturer over a short five-year window would be considered as their “best” or premium rig. The table below contains the list of premium transceivers by manufacturer and year with the market-entry price.
Beginning in the 1960s for Sherwood Table rigs, it was Drake, Collins and Heath leading the way. The Collins S-Line radio weighed in at a health $6,300 in 2021 money! Drake and Heath had radios far less than one-half that. Such was the race during the 1970s as well with Kenwood entering the fray with the very popular TS-520 hybrid radios at $3,400. Beginning in the 1980s, several companies introduced radios that by today’s monetary value are very high-pocket rigs. Collins continued their lead with the KWM-380. Drake was another with their TR-7. Icom offered a radio north of $10,000 by the mid-1980s (the IC-781) and Yaesu followed suit Much later, Hilberling would drop a boulder into the price pond with a radio that hit the 20 grand mark. Flex and Icom rang in, respectively, during the 2015 period with premium radios in the $8,000 and $15,000 range, all in 2021 dollars.
Working through the table, however, makes it challenging to see the whole picture for manufacturer-specific trends. The line chart below gets beyond the manufacturers who release a single high-priced radio or so (e.g., Hilberling, noted for the single point). The chart shows more clearly that it was Collins who introduced the premium radio but it was Icom who took over in the mid-1980s and has largely maintained that pattern of highest priced premium radios. There was a drop during the early portion of the 2010-14 period but Icom bounced back into the lead for premium-priced radios.
The competitors, like Yaesu, who challenged during the 1980s, moved away from the lead in offering premium rigs. Kenwood was really never in that price range. Newcomers, like Flex and Elecraft, have never competed with Icom for the price lead. What each manufacturer’s premium rig brings to the user involves more than receive performance. Transmit purity is something that Rob Sherwood has discussed as the next big barrier for transceiver manufacturers. So it’s important for the viewer to consider one’s preferred feature-set to make a determination if the premium rig is worth the money. The graph below allows for the interactive exploration of each premium radio in the Sherwood list.
But I’ve also provided the measures of bench-tested receive performance and the performance-for-price among this set of premium radios. You will find that there is a set of clearly distinctive radios that match Icom in bench-tested performance while coming in significantly lower in terms of their market-entry price. The general trends in this movement over time are rather sharply defined. Let’s begin with measured receive performance.
The Sherwood Performance Index (SPI) in the line chart illustrates how the premium rigs offered in the past decade are at the top level of receive performance. Icom (IC-7851 @ $15,266) is at the lead followed by Elecraft (K4D @ $5,500), Flex (6700 @ $8,015), and Hilberling (PT-8000A @ $20,065). Following about 10 points on the SPI behind are Kenwood and Yaesu. (This is 2/3s of a standard deviation on the SPI). So at the price difference for the Icom premium rig with it’s feature-set at 2 or 3 times the Elecraft or Flex rigs with their respective feature-sets worth it? This is ultimately a personal consumer decision.
But we can put it into a more explicit framework for the receive performance-for-price assessment. I’ve created a similar line chart with the Performance-for-Price Ratio (PPR). Here’s where the notions of brand loyalty, feature set, and ergonomics are put at the critical junction of how much are they worth for the measured receiver performance when one is considering only premium radios. Recall that the absolute SPI numbers were about the same for the Icom, Elecraft, Flex and Hilberling premium radios. The Hilberling is much more expensive than the Icom offering which are each far more costly than the Elecraft and Flex premium radios.
The PPR line chart below illustrates that the desired feature-set and brand loyalty can be very expensive. The Yaesu transceivers, the FTDX101D and FTDX10, have the highest receive performance for the market-entry price at about 1.45. Elecraft’s K4D performance per dollar (1.25 or greater) than does the Icom 7851 at 0.91. (Note: the IC705 QRP rig was released in the 2020-24 period with a PPR of 1.22.) Flex’s 6700 rings in at a PPR of 1.10, some 0.2 higher than the Icom 7851. Hilberling’s princely priced rig is down below 0.8. The Kenwood premium radio (TS-890) has a PPR of 1.30, also higher than the Icom 7851 but lower than the Yaesu premium transceivers. Thus, the offerings by Yaesu, Elecraft, Flex and Kenwood have made substantial inroads into the premium receive performance segment but without as high a market-entry price as the Icom transceivers.
The Icom or Hilberling transceivers might just be the ticket for the ham who wants to pay for the feature set or is just an “Icom guy (or gal)” or “Hilberling” aficionado in terms of HF radios. But if money is indeed an object to consider, right up there with receive performance and all that suggests about the full transceiver, then the premium radio offerings of Elecraft, Flex, Yaesu and perhaps Kenwood should be on the table for consideration.
I bought a new Porsche convertible shipped from Stuttgart in 2005. Absolutely loved the engineering! The caliper brakes saved my life at least twice driving on I-85 north of Atlanta. But after 10 years, I traded it for a Chevy Silverado LTZ pickup. Crazy? Not really, because of the use-case. I couldn’t easily pick up lumber at Lowes in my beloved silver Porsche, even with the top down. But the killer was when we could not fit a third garage bay in a new home under construction. I needed a pickup for household chores and portable operating. HOA regulations meant no parking an automobile in a driveway. So I made a choice. It’s not wholly unlike buying a premium transceiver, no? We make choices on what we are willing to pay for and this depends on our use-case. Some will spend much more. But most will consider the cost within a premium market segment. These results may be a useful guidepost for a premium HF transceiver.
Collins set the stage for the emergence of the premium HF radio. That mantle was picked up by Icom and continues to the present day. There are a few bit players in this realm, like Hilberling. But it’s clear from these data that the newcomers, Elecraft and Flex, as well as old-timers like Yaesu and to some degree Kenwood, have offerings that meet or exceed the receive performance levels of the premium Icom radios. Moreover, they have their own premium feature-sets, too. It’s a good day to buy a radio! I hope these data and tools help you shape your purchase decision more effectively.