Lace's Alumitone pickup

How does this electric pickup work:
http://lacemusic.com/electric_pickups/alumitone/alumitone_specs.php

It looks like it's got a single loop wire in PU body with two ceramic magnets (what they call exoskeleton) combined with a small transformer (2k7 DC resistance in secondary). Is this easily diyable with lets say ribbon mic transformers?

Found also this description:
http://music-electronics-forum.com/showthread.php?t=5291

The patent shows it all:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6897369.pdf
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5831196.pdf (another closer to the actual product)

> www.freepatentsonline.com/6897369.pdf

Needs registration. Use Google Patents:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=TI4WAAAAEBAJ&dq=5831196
http://www.google.com/patents?id=Oh0VAAAAEBAJ&dq=6897369

> Is this easily diyable

That's some tricky topology. Yeah, you could bend it up and solder it in copper. In aluminum you will probably be confounded by contact resistance unless you own a jet-cutter.

I don't see any instant virtue in "low impedance reception", and some added monkey-motion in the low/high conversion. The patent itself speaks of "less expensive" as a prime feature. This can only be true after you pay-off the jet-cutter and the jigging, but then the integration of "winding" and top-cover does start to look like a viable production product. And the mixed reviews say they can be great. At a hundred bucks lowball retail, I'd have to love metalwork a lot more than I do to even think of DIYing these.

> say ribbon mic transformers?

No. The exoskeleton is the "primary". It must thread the core. Try any handy 10K transformer which has space to weave your exo through. That (with magnets!) will "make sound"; good guitar tone will require more fiddling.

If you just want a DIY pickup, the "lipstick" is as simple as it gets. You can buy parts for the usual 6-pole pickups and wind-yer-own. This Alumitone may be a good pickup, but it is a lot about manufacturing and marketing advantage too, not really a DIY thing.

.....OK I know what's bothering me. It has no iron core coupling the string volume. They can actually get away with that, using the new hot neoby magnets; but it "sees" a larger volume of string-space. That will affect how much of the strings node-pattern it catches. The same could be done conventionally with bigger poles. Which again suggests the real point is manufacturing and marketing.