Brian Kelly wrote:

Dave Heil wrote in message ...
Brian Kelly wrote:


...and I saw a fairly priced 75A-4 at the Washington, PA hamfest this
morning. I resisted.

Woo-woo! Nice piece. What are they going for these days?

Well, there's the ebay price and there's the small hamfest price.
This one was in pretty good shape and a firm 500 clams.

Without knowing just what A4s have been going for these days $500
seems to be reasonable if it's in decent shape.

The Pittsburgh WB3 who was mulling the buy over contacted the seller the
day after the hamfest and bought it.

Ya hafta resist or ya go nuts. I've sworn to myself not to clutter
this place up with any boat anchors.

I have not taken such a vow.

Was not optional in my case.

None. Zero tolerance for boat
anchors around here. But then I spot the R4B and the 75S-3B again and
remember all the goodies I worked and all the fun I had with them and
start to crumble. I need a Boat Anchors Anonymous chapter to help me
deal with it but alas, no such thing . . .

Go with the flow.

Depends on what's flowing where. I have health and space problems and
was sinking in cubic yards upon cubic yards of up to 50 years worth of
CRAP and was almost under when I decided that I had to either take my
life back or commit hari-kari. So I spread almost all of my posessions
out on an empty 20 x 80 foot floor in the old textile mill I'd haunted
since I was a kid. I sorted thru the heap and picked a small pile to
save for myself. Then I invited family members and a few others to
trash pick the heap before I ordered the dumpster. Micollis got his
van load.

Sure wish I'd known you back then. It would have been worth a road
trip!

Then I went berserk and turned myself into a one-man front end loader
and up the hill to the landfill the 30 or 40 yard trash container
went. In retrospect I probably should have kept some stuff I
dumpstered but I'm not losing any sleep over it. I did my kids a
favor, they'll dumpster everything which is left anyway when I croak
so I've saved them some of that chore

....or they'll put it on ebay and smile all the way to the bank.

. . like my Quaker school first grade teacher admonished "Know thyself
Master Brian!". Yeah, I do know myself, I'm patterned, I'm a
compulsive pack rat. That's why I gotta be a hardass and not go back
to collecting nice old radios else I'll wind up right back where I
was.

My bride and I are both packrat types. That's one reason we had to
build the 16 x 30' barn. Thankfully, there's heat out there so the
stuff doesn't get damaged.

It beats collecting Hummel figurines.

Don't even bring up Hummels David . . the ex is a Hummel freak who has
a buddy who was the wife of a G.I. stationed in Germany back when the
Hummel craze was barely getting off the ground. Net result being that
the ex has some number of 25 gallon fibre barrels fulla the things
which she bought with pocket change back then. Gotta be worth big
bucks today. Many years later the property settlement was not pretty.
She and her idiot lawyer got to nit picking my assets so just to be
annoying I told de judge that I wanted to get into splitting up the
collection of Hummels. Which she "conveniently" forgot to list as one
of her assets of course. At which point my lawyer hissed in my ear,
"If you intend to get serious about splitting up a collection of #%X&#
Hummels go find another lawyer!".

I have a cousin going through all of that now. His soon-to-be-ex is
another Hummel fanatic. There wasn't an uncluttered flat surface in
their large house. His lawyer told him pretty much the same thing as
yours told you.

Ahhh! They have a "William" variant. The Orion is available with a
built-in antenna tuner. I didn't get that model.

Unless it can impedance-match his TV rabbit ears it wouldn't do much
for him. Maybe when he wises up and moves . .

Or does some planning so that he can put up a decent antenna with
adequate safeguards so his kids can't touch it.

Per a post of his around here a couple days ago he's trying to be
contrite and explained that his antenna problem involves some sort of
installation "restrictions". Maybe like CC&Rs or some such, he didn't
say . . .

Could be CC&R problems. It could be wifely concerns about the chil'ren.
It could be his concern about what the neighbors will say. A simple
A-frame mast or even a 4x4 topped with a 2x4 would have given him
another support. He could have easily protected the fed portion from
the chil'ren.

"It's all about the chil'ren

Whatta weenie . .

After a long period of observed behavior, I'm in agreement.

Or like the guy across the street who bought a 40 inch flatsceen TV
"for the chullins" but they're not allowed to use it.

Doesn't want to damage their sensitive eyes?

After I finally got my Novice ticket Pop found out real quick what I
was doing to his world so we agreed that I wouln't fire up the 80M
ARC-5 on Friday nites while the "Gillette Calvacade of Sports" fights
were on the boob tube. The problem I had with Mom ealier however did
not involve an "agreement".

Our old B&W TV in Oak Hill, WV must've had a 21 meg IF. I ate it alive
every time I tried to get on 15m with the old DX-40. I spent my days as
a Novice on 40 and 80m.

That could have gotten a whole lot
more confrontational. Zed Zainoon W8ENJ, a Lebanese-American screwed up
the TV reception at a Moundsville bar close to his home back in the
early '50s with his Collins KW-1 AM KW. There was very nearly a
lynching.

Heeee! Precious moments in ham radio.

There are guys (beer drinkers, not hams) STILL talking about it!

We were in a two-house compound in Botswana. A chunky, middle-aged,
single personnel lady moved in next door. She raised hell about my 160m
sigs setting off her burglar alarm. One embassy staffer tried to be
helpful. "David is transmitting at way too high a frequency", he
opined.

Only the Regional Security Officer, the younger brother of actress
Margarent Colin, had a handle on the situation. I outlined the problem,
including the fact that none of the alarm system wires was shielded.
He had the house system rewired by a local technician. When the guy
showed up with some small shielded cable, Tom said, "This stuff is too
thin and unobtrusive to run down her walls. Don't you have any fat gray
or black cable that'll really show up?" That's what they used, big ugly
gray wire running to each motion detector head. It eliminated the
personel officer's problem and mine.

Dave K8MN