What is Mostly DIY RF, Anyway?
That really should be a “who” and not a “what” question. Mostly DIY RF is just a trade name for me, Todd Carney, K7TFC. I’m a garden-variety amateur-radio enthusiast, and I don’t mind admitting I’m also an amateur at manufacturing and business as well. Naturally, I try to do my best at all three, but nevertheless as a true amateur (from the Latin amare: to love; doing something for the love of it).
As a business, MDRF is the smallest possible: it’s just me, K7TFC. There’s no other workers or employees, and there’s certainly no other investors or sources of capital. The good side of this is that I don’t have to answer to anyone else, nor do I need to meet their expectations of profit or capital gains. I can offer products to fellow amateurs that no properly-capitalized company would ever bother with, and I can do so at prices that are lower than what a high-overhead firm could get away with. In fact, my business overhead is the same one I live under, and though I do have some dedicated space for MDRF work, my kitchen table has been pressed into service more than once.
The downside of being small and self-funded is that I can’t produce products quickly at high volumes. In general, I cannot maintain a stock of pre-assembled and tested items (such as crystal QER filters or TIA-AGC amps), so on the website and in product listings I indicate these can take up to fourteen days to ship. My ability to maintain large stocks of parts and components is limited as well, more so for specialized items than for “popcorn” parts. I may need to wait a few days for parts to arrive before getting an order out the door and on its way to the buyer. Given the worldwide disruptions of the component “supply chain” in recent years (a situation still in recovery), delays may last for more than a few days. As I have done in the past, though, I let buyers know what’s going on.
I take the mostly in Mostly DIY RF seriously. Selling a QER crystal filter to a homebrewer for his otherwise-scratch-built rig, or a surface-mount dual-gate MOSFET breakout to a builder with aging eyes and shaky hands, or an IF amp with AGC to anyone who doesn’t feel up to putting one together (because he chooses his battles carefully), is pretty-much the niche I want to roost in. You know, sometimes there’s just too many things to do to get a project working, in addition to all the other things in life. I can’t help with any of those, but I am happy to offer some little thing or two that will get your project doable, done, and on the air.
See my QRZ bio at www.qrz.com/db/K7TFC, and my personal ham-radio blog at k7tfc.com