As has already been said, the $500 offer is for clubs only.

My club is buying two of them. The plan is to put one on UHF, and the 
other will replace a 30 year-old 2 meter box.

There are two other machines in the area that are using similar 
commercial equipment, but only a hand full of people with the radios to 
take advantage of it.

The attraction for my club was to have something that we can use to 
develop a new linking network, and the fact that you cannot build an 
analogue repeater from scratch for that price unless you already have a 
bunch of old stuff sitting around.

This doesn't force people into the complexities of DStar, and to have 
to deal with audio that sounds as bad as a cell phone.

-- 
Mike Duke, K5XU