Hi All,
Clarity must be further improved to meet Sagetech performance standards, and we will embark on another design iteration to improve RF receiver sensitivity. The Clarity ship date is now March 29, 2013, just prior to Sun’n’Fun.
This was a very difficult decision for us, and I understand that we will take a fair amount of heat from people. As we moved into production, we saw problems preventing Clarity’s 978MHz receiver from performing as designed. In side-to-side tests against another ADS-B receiver, we saw equivalent performance. For example, in one test Clarity and another receiver both reliably received 4 stations (with reasonable bit-error-rates) at 5000’ over the edge Oregon’s Willamette Valley, but Clarity’s design predicts that it should receive 6 stations in that location. We tracked the problem down to some internal noise reducing the sensitivity of the receiver.
Sagetech has a long history of success in the unmanned aircraft industry, and we turned specifically to our history in making this decision. Our past shows clearly that upholding the highest standards has been a key element to our growth and customer satisfaction. We designed and delivered (and continue to deliver) thousands of transponders and avionics modules to Boeing/Insitu for use in their ScanEagle aircraft with amazingly high quality, reliability, and performance. So when we considered meeting our original ship date with a product we know to be underperforming, merely matching the competition we avoided the temptation to relax our standards and ship. We made the only decision we could make. It has to be right. Period.
Excellence and Elegance are our guiding principles. Despite that we will disappoint some, despite that this will be very expensive adding significantly to the development cost, we have to admit our mistake and uphold our standards by delaying shipment and embarking on another design iteration.
We know the redesign will add cost, and beginning Jan 1, we will announce new, higher pricing. We will honor existing pricing on our website until then and we encourage new customers to get in their pre-orders now to take advantage of present pricing.
We’ve offered existing pre-order customers the opportunity to cancel orders, and the initial response has been very positive. Only one person has cancelled their order. Most who reply with comments indicate support for maintaining high standards and praise us for not succumbing to the temptation to ship product that doesn’t outperform the competition. Clarity will be the only device to offer a dual channel receive capability (with traffic), synthetic vision AHRS, and internal battery all in a single small package. Add to that the two patent pending features: 1) Data-Burst (Clarity stores incoming messages while your iPad sleeps) and 2) the internal phased array antenna---when Clarity is worthy of bearing the Sagetech name, we’re sure you’ll love it.
I’d like to thank our customers and partners in advance for their patience. Sagetech is good at many things, and making the switch from military grade unmanned aircraft avionics to consumer aviation products is proving to be a significant learning process for us. We’ve made mistakes with the way we are introducing Clarity. But we will learn, do better, and most importantly always uphold our design standards. That’s the Sagetech way.
Thank you.