On Fri, 31 Oct 2014, gareth wrote:

50 years ago the world was buzzing with AR88s (both D and LF), HROs,
CR100s and the like.

What has happened to them all?

Surely no self-respecting radio amateur would ever think of putting
them in the garbage?

But that's exactly what happened to them.

People bought them to be used. Thus all those modifications, they wanted
better receivers, not resale value. They weren't tossed away immediately,
they were tossed over time, well after the receivers were replaced.

IN the early seventies, it was easy to get "boatanchors". People didn't
want the stuff, it wasn't solid state and it wasn't SSB, so it was common
to find at the ham fleamarkets and auctions, and cheap. I went through a
lot of junk in that period, buying it for a few dollars, then trading it
for something or stripping it for some reason. Nobody was thinking about
history.

So a lot of it wsa cleared out. Probably lots of hams died, and the stuff
trashed, too.

It was only decades later that "boatanchors" became collectable.
Originally "boatanchor" was a slur, something big and heavy and fairly
useless (like some WWII surplus, which seems to be what the term wsa
originally applied to), but as SSB and transistors came in, it came to
apply to ham equipment too. People grew up, they had money, and they
either regretted getting rid of that junk back then, or wanted that stuff
they lusted after as kids, but could never afford. So the price of what
remained went up, because there was demand, and supply was low (because
the period of trashing had occurred).

Let's not forget that a lot of WWII surplus was so common that it held a
low price for a long time. I could get a Command Set transmitter here in
Canada for 9.95 Canadian in the fall of 1972, almost 30 years after the
war ended. It was still in a box. That takes a long time to clear out,
but it also means not a high value was placed on the equipment in the
first place. If you have to pay hundreds of dollars, you will be careful,
if it's ten bucks, you can always buy another one.

The scenario is no different from "antique" radios They were old and big
and didn't do anything that newer radios didn't, so for most people they
were junk. There were some collectors in the sixties and seventies, but I
didn't know about the concept until about 1974 when there was an antique
radio column in Elementary Electronics. But in 1972, a school teacher
offered me an A****er Kent chassis, because he'd gotten the radio cheap,
and wanted to use the cabinet as a liquor cabinet. I kept the chassis for
a few years, then it wsa just getting in the way. Around the same time,
the shop teacher at school was taking old AA5 radios, removing them from
their cabinets, painting them with dayglo paint, and then putting them in
homemade plexiglass cabients. The time hadn't yet come where they were
generally valued for what they had been.

So now supplies are limited. And demand is higher, though I get the
impression it's peaked. You can get that Clegg VHF receiver you lusted
after seeing the ads as a kid, but it will cost you. YOu can find
the manual for that Tapetone (I think it was) VHF receiver) that
you once saw in an ad and never heard about again, though it's
still not clear how many of those were made (or if any were
actually made).

However, you may still have a better chance of finding one since you don't
have to hope someone locally bought one back then, and now is selling it
off. There's ebay, that makes everything "local".


It will be rare to find stuff cheap. I was increadibly lucky 2 years ago
to get that TMC GPR-90 for $20 at a garage sale, a case of someone
clearing out a home and not wanting to find the right place to sell it. I
suspect that if I'd not come along that day, nobody would have passed by
that recognized it, and it would have been put in the garbage after the
sale.

Michael