I got an email yesterday from the Airtronics service department. They told me to send it to them. Great. I'm in Japan and they are in California. But I will be in that area in late March so potentially I could bring the radio with me and have it fixed during my stay. (BTW, has anyone had any problems bringing RC radio gear as checked luggage on airplanes?) They also mentioned that they have a trade-in program where I trade in my RDS8000 for a discount on a SD-10GS. They haven't gotten back to me yet on the amount of this discount.

You're right that the antenna housing is very weak. In fact, it's broken on two of my three RDS8000 radios. Curious, in addition to the broken antenna housing, a corner of two of bodies has also broken off (but is held in place with the screw joining the two halves). In both cases it's broken off in almost exactly the same way in exactly the same spot (upper right corner). Shows there must be some inherent weakness at this point. I ended up hot-gluing the broken antenna housing in place. None of this is too surprising when you do the math and calculate what the Tx is actually worth. I was able to buy my RDS8000 for around $120 on sale (at Hobby People) that included a Tx battery, Rx, Rx battery, charger, and switch. Subtract all that stuff from the price and you come up with something like $25 bucks for the Tx.

Once thing I really like about the Futaba 8J is that the antenna is ENTIRELY internal.