Here’s a crazy story.
Apparently, the Navy purchased 450 counterfeit, VHF/UHF antennas for $165,000. Now, that in itself is pretty crazy. That works out to nearly $370 per antenna. But, these are special, wearable, presumably very high-reliability antennas, so maybe that’s OK. (You can get them online, in single unit quantities, for $450 each.)
What happened here is that the purchase required that the antennas be bought from a small manufacturer or distributor. Mastodon, the manufacturer of the antenna, previously qualified for this designation, but they were recently purchased by a larger defense contractor and lost that status.
Somehow, a small company called Vizocom got wind of this and jumped into the breach. Instead of purchasing the antennas from Mastodon, however, they bought knockoffs from China. Vizocom paid just a little over $12,000 for the antennas that they resold to the Navy for $165,000.
The reporters discovered that Vizocom was just a shell company. It has no real offices. The company operates out of a single-family home in El Cajon, CA.
I know that $165,000 is a drop in the bucket, compared to the overall defense budget, but you’d think that the Armed Forces would have better incoming quality control, wouldn’t you?
“Apparently, the Navy purchased 450 counterfeit, VHF/UHF antennas for $165,000. Now, that in itself is pretty crazy.”
Yes.
“That works out to nearly $3,700 per antenna.”
No, $366.67 per antenna, only about 1/10 as crazy ;-) .
Opppps. Fixed.
From the Quartz article you reference “Investigators eventually discovered a purchase order issued to Alpha Antenna by Vizocom that requested testing, packaging, and shipping to the Navy 450 antennas for just $12,208.50.” That’s kind of interesting. Alpha also markets a lot of amateur radio antennas. From their web site: “Alpha Antenna 100% Owned, Designed & Made In the USA by U.S. Citizens”. Hmmmm.
I guess maybe they did not source them through. So who really knows… but still makes you wonder about anything you read these days.