RadioBanter - View Single Post - FA: Some nice HP gear from my home lab....

In article ,
says...
That would be the day. What's the right price for your 8566B with
manuals, etc.? I see Nick at Ridge Equipment has one up for $9k,
but I doubt he'll sell it. Looking at the last 30 days, I see one
fellow who had two "untested" units, accepting $3100 "best offers"
for each, and another guy who got a $2700 "buy-it-now" sale for his
"untested" unit with a "dim screen". All three "untested" units had
photos indicating reasonable physical condition and some kind of
apparently-proper display operation. There's another one, "as is"
with a dark-screen photo, starting at $6499, with no bidders.

It's tough to say. At the end of the day it's worth whatever the
second-highest bidder thinks it's worth. Ordinarily, I'd wait for all
those others to sell or otherwise disappear from the field before
putting one up for sale, but I think this one will out-compete the
others without any trouble... at least among buyers who know what
they're looking for. A dim CRT is not a good thing on these units,
because the focus is the first thing to go. By the time the emission is
down, you don't get a very clean image.

At any rate, a $9K starting bid on an 8566B with a DOA-only guarantee is
just a waste of a listing fee, and everybody's time to boot. Much
better to start low and encourage people to look at the item on its
merits. I'd be surprised if mine doesn't land in the $6K-$7K
neighborhood. $8K-$9K is a high but still-fair price, if someone has
the cash on hand and has been waiting for the right one.

That particular 8566B from Ridge does look clean, but it has some
serious phase-noise peaking going on. (Compare his CRT image with the
same shot in my auction, particularly taking the different reference
levels into account.) Even if you paid $9K for his, you'd still want to
open it up and poke around the first-LO synthesizer with an ESR meter.
Something -- probably something cheap but difficult to find -- is
packing up and getting ready to go out to lunch in that one.

-- jm

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