GRE: Dead or Alive?

[mmckenna]

I agree, probably wouldn't be too much of a stretch to start building them again under the Alinco name. Alinco already sells receivers, so they are in the business.

[Michael-SATX]

Thanks for clarifying which HQ moved to a small building. (Signs of cash flow or just saving money?)
So was this booth labled ALINCO/GRECOM or just ALINCO ? To also clarify, in your previous post
you said "there wasn't any NEW GRE stuff there" then you say "you don't recall seeing any GRE there
Did you even remember seeing any GRECOM signage even displayed ? Hope others get some pics

If I were ALINCO, I would keep the name GRECOM to retain momentum and keep their vast customer loyalty base !!!

btw ~ I asked before and had no answer ~ since Radio Shack has their name on their RS/GRE Pro line of scanners and retains the
intelectual property rights to the looks and designs. Curious if Radio Shack could legally pursue a new private brand replacement factory ?

[mmckenna]

The booth was labeled Alinco/Grecom, but that was likely the same set up left over from last years show.

Remember, I was there to do my job, so gathering info on scanners wasn't top of my list of things to do. Looking back, I don't think I saw ANY of the GRE stuff there. Last year they were there and had a number of GRE radio and a number of guys working the booth. This year it was one guy and, from what I recall, just Alinco products.

[Michael-SATX]

Thanks for completely clarifying things. Waiting for GRECOM's outcome is like a bad soap opera?
So doing your job at the show entails what ... are you a 2-way radio rep/dealer or a ham rep/dealer ?
I work for you know who and we haven't heard zip on our end and most models still show active hmm?

[mmckenna]

Nah, I'm the telecommunications engineer for the University of California Santa Cruz campus. I run the telephone, radio and 911 dispatch systems, cellular BDA's, etc. I've got a couple of guys that work for me, but I get to pull rank and get the trip to Las Vegas. I've been going the last few years to keep up on all the new technology that is coming out. We installed an 800MHz Kenwood NexEdge trunked system last year and I always make a point to visit the Kenwood booth to see what's up. The rest of the stuff is pure gravy.

[Michael-SATX]

Nice, I have often thought that maybe Kenwood could step up their game and maybe look at getting
into comsumer radio scanners. The have alot of expertise in radios and manufacturing quality gear

[mmckenna]

Yeah, could be. They seem to be too busy aiming at Motorola. Used to be Kenwood and Vertex were nipping at Moto's heels. Now that Moto bought out Vertex, it's pretty much Kenwood. They're giving them a run for their money, but the old guard that grew up on Motorola radios won't buy anything but. As people retire, Kenwood seems to be coming in and taking over. Our fire department went all Kenwood about 12 years ago. I'm starting to shift our PD over to Kenwood now also.
Icom is doing pretty well, but they don't have much presence in the 700 & 800MHz markets yet. They need to improve their quality a bit if they are going to play. EF Johnson, Harris, etc are starting to grow pretty fast. I'm betting in the next 10 years or so we will see Motorola get tipped off the number one position. They just don't seem to have the service they used to, and their marketing people are really starting to get on peoples nerves. They still make great gear, but they've lost it on service, support and price. They are really pushing some of the LTE for public safety stuff, but I think that's not going to really be a viable solution for at least another 10 years or so. They've pushed P25 so hard that they've just about saturated the market. I don't see anyone being able to afford to do the LTE stuff for quite a while to come. I won't be surprised to see them start to slowly implode under their own doing. MotoTrbo is pretty good and seems to be taking the market, but there is a lot of competition in that venue.

[mmckenna]

Kenwood, Icom and Vertex/Yaesu always had a few amateur products on display. Since most of us are hams on the side, there was usually a pretty good crowd around the stuff. Vertex seemed to drop their stuff, but they did have some of the commercial HF stuff on display, no ham though, this year. Icom had a few things on display, but not as much as in years past. They did have some of their receivers on display. Kenwood had one big HF radio there, but that was it. Kenwood seems to be pretty comfortable in the ham market, and they have the benefit of moving commercial VHF products over to the ham sector. It's really hard to miss the similarities between the TM-281 and some of the LMR products. When I was a Kenwood training in Long Beach a few years ago they had a big Ham shack there in the building. Most of their guys where ham operators on top of what they normally do. They seem to be doing well, but the focus of Kenwood is really on the LMR market.

[dgmaley]

but the old guard that grew up on Motorola radios won't buy anything but


Yep, that's me. I would have to spec out the comm gear for a fire school on a college campus. The rule was "nobody ever got fired for specing out Motorola". We used to call it "Brand X" because it was the brand everyone else compared to.
Yep, I'm also a HAM. Have one piece of Brand X left. It's a 1950's lunchbox VHF radio on the 2 meter band. Was their first use of transistors. Used a pencil tube transmitter. Still works.
Yes, I'm retired too.

Dave...

[trsundstrom]

Wirelessly posted (Moto Droid Bionic: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.4; en-us; DROID BIONIC Build/6.7.2-223_DBN_M4-23) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30)

Ah, the Heathkit? Amazing little boxes in their day...

[Arizona_Scanner]

As they existed until now, they are done and finished. Will someone eventually resurrect the name? Maybe, but it's not likely.

With encryption closing in on the hobby and prices so high in an economy that continues to remain rough, the market isn't what it once was. The cost of getting it all going again would probably be too much.

With that said, the PSR-500 / PSR-600, and the RS clones, were the best at decoding digital into voice that sounds good, and so long as you don't try hooking them to an outdoor antenna in a rich RF environment, they are truly great for what they are / were. The PSR-800 is a unique radio, the only GRE to have enough "scan lists" / memory capacity to make the radio realistic for serious enthusiasts like myself, who live in big cities. I would say to go out and get your PSR-800 while you can, but that is easier said that done now. A quick search shows that they are all but impossible to find now, and will become even harder to find as time goes by.