The SignalStuff 2024 Black Friday Sale!

TL;DR: This sale will go live on Friday, Nov 29, and run through Monday, Dec 2! Stay tuned for updates!

It’s been another year! We decided to try something new this year and tell you about the sale a bit ahead of time, but first, let me share a bit about our year!

Mon, Nov 18, 2024

New Website Released!

🚀 New SignalStuff Website! 🚀

It’s finally here! We’re thrilled to introduce the all-new SignalStuff website, designed to be faster, smarter, and more user-friendly than ever before.

🛠 Why the Change?

Our old site was built on WordPress, and to put it bluntly, it had become ridiculously slow—so slow that some of you gave up trying to place orders, and we’re truly sorry about that. Managing performance on that platform became a losing battle.

Enter the new SignalStuff site, powered by a Vendure backend (check out Vendure if you’re curious). It’s custom-built to be fast, extensible, and much easier to use!

Fri, Oct 25, 2024

The SignalStuff 2023 Black Friday sale!

NOTE: The sale is over, thanks to all who supported us through this event!

Another year mostly on the books! The support from our customers has been overwhelming and I sincerely appreciate it! It is truly staggering to realize just how big this has become! Here are some interesting stats:

Product sales (on the website only) between Jan 1, 2023 and Oct 30, 2023:

Fri, Nov 17, 2023

The SignalStuff 2022 “I can’t believe I missed Black Friday!” sale

The short version

Due to circumstances beyond our control we missed doing our traditional Black Friday sale, so we’re doing one a week late! The sale will begin on Friday, Dec 2, 2022 and will continue through the end of Tuesday, Dec 6, 2022. If we run out of stock on anything I’ll make more and get them shipped within a week.

The sale:

Fri, Dec 2, 2022

2022 Black Friday sale will be delayed

UPDATE Dec 1, 2022: The sale will begin on Dec 2, 2022 (tomorrow)! Stay tuned for details…. I need to figure them out myself.

Hi all!

I’m going to make a long story really short – I want to do a sale, I really do. Unfortunately, I have almost nothing *to* sell right now, and I don’t want to take your money when I still don’t have a definite date when that will be corrected.

Fri, Nov 25, 2022

How Signal Sticks are made

For some time I’ve been debating the idea of sharing a bit of the “behind the curtain” of how SignalStuff as a company and Signal Sticks as a product work; there are a lot of reasons for and against the idea, but my hope is that by adding some clarity around my business it will add some value to the Ham Radio community:

Wed, Sep 21, 2022

Feb 2022 - Our prices are changing

We have maintained the same price for over 10 years – since long before we opened the web store. Unfortunately, our profit margins have been taking a steady hit:

• The 1.5mm nitinol wires cost a bit more than the 1.1mm wires did
• We now have connectors custom made in order to improve quality
• We’re getting everything in black now so that things look snazzy
• Material (particularly metal) prices have been slowly but steadily increasing over time
• Due to issues with COVID we haven’t been able to gather as many suckers volunteers from the local ham radio community to help with manufacturing.
• Because of the above, I’ve needed to pay another company to build the signal sticks for me, which has a very measurable effect on the margins which actually exceeds the increase we’re making here.

Wed, Feb 2, 2022

2021 Black Friday / Cyber Monday Sale

Another year passed and we’re in November already! Several of you have asked already if we are doing a Black Friday sale – as a policy we don’t give out details of any sales before we announce them. This is a good company policy because aside from other considerations it nicely obscures the fact that I usually decide exactly what we’re doing while we are typing up the announcement. Shhh… don’t tell!

Thu, Nov 25, 2021

2020 Black Friday / Cyber Monday Sale

Wow – this has been quite a year! So far this year:

• The pandemic led to the need for fully remote exams, which mostly use our ExamTools system
• SignalStuff owner Richard, KD7BBC, changed to half time at his day job (this has always been a side project, did you know?) so he could spend more time on HamStudy and ExamTools development – all funded by sales from this site!
• We partnered with S&K Antennas to bring you the Signal Staff
• We introduced graduated volume discount pricing for Signal Sticks
• We introduced colored Signal Sticks – including a fully Glow In the Dark signal stick, because you know you want one ;-)
• And most recently (in the last few weeks) we finally have a vehicle mount super-elastic antenna, the Signal Stalk!

So, it seems like a good time to celebrate =] And so we introduce to you the 2020 Black Friday Sale:

Thu, Nov 26, 2020

2019 Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale

This sale will start on Nov 29, 2019 at 12:00 am MST and run through midnight on Dec 2, 2019.

We have for you this year:

Thu, Nov 28, 2019

2018 Black Friday sale – all antennas 25% off

From Friday, Nov 23 through Monday, Nov 26, 2018, SignalStuff will be running a Black Friday sale with all antennas 25% off!

Wed, Nov 21, 2018

Improving the SMA-F connector caps

It’s interesting how sometimes small side effects can add up over time to be a real problem.  Recently I’ve had a couple of concerning support requests which led me to start taking some measurements, and I discovered something concerning: our SMA-F connector covers have been gradually changing over time, slowly enough that I had not noticed until it started being an issue for a few customers.

Tue, Jan 30, 2018

2017 Black Friday sale - all antennas 25% off

From Friday, Nov 24 through Monday, Nov 27, 2017, SignalStuff will be running a Black Friday sale with all antennas 25% off!

Wed, Nov 22, 2017

Happy World Amateur Radio day!

In honor of this day we are offering free shipping on all orders to anywhere from today (April 18) through Friday, April 21, 2017.

Tue, Apr 18, 2017

Choosing the correct antenna connector for your radio

It seems we have not so far done a very good job of helping people figure out which connector is which, so this is a handy guide to help you figure out which antenna connector you need!

Mon, Aug 15, 2016

What kind of gain do the Signal Sticks have?

Questions about antenna gain

Probably the question I get asked most is “what kind of gain do the signal sticks have”, and “why don’t you list gain on the site?”  I have answered many people individually, but it comes up often enough that I figured I should probably write up an explanation.

Mon, Jul 4, 2016

Using 3d printing to improve the Super-Elastic Signal Stick

One challenge with a project like these antennas is that we are constantly looking for ways to improve on our previous designs. The reason this is a challenge is that often when we develop an improvement which has significant advantages it also changes the appearance of the antenna, which both creates the possibility that people will not like the change and creates a transitory period where people expect the product to remain constant but we have some stock of the old and some of the new.

That said, we’ve been experimenting with a 3d printer and have started producing covers for the antenna and anti-eye-pokers (that’s a highly technical term) for the tips. Here are some pictures of what the new antennas look like:

Wed, Jan 27, 2016

SMA male antennas are back in stock

Thanks in part to several hams in Utah and Salt Lake counties who assisted, we now have SMA male antennas back in stock.  I have black and yellow in my hand right now, but red and blue antennas will be done in about four hours; not in time to ship today (Jan 1), but does mail run today anyway? =]  They’ll be ready to ship tomorrow, and our stock will build up as we finish applying the final two steps of antenna construction.

Fri, Jan 1, 2016

Cyber-Monday sale

Just for kicks and grins, we decided to join the whole “Cyber-Monday” thing. So, today only (Monday, Nov 30 2015) all of our antennas are 25% off. That’s right, $15 / each instead of $20 / each!

Mon, Nov 30, 2015