laura halliday wrote:
There are indeed used professional receivers out there.
You will get an astonishing radio if it has a name on it like
Watkins-Johnson or Harris (two names that have shown
up in this thread), but just because they're less than
they were new doesn't mean they're cheap.

I spent about a day's salary on my WJ-8716. I contrast that with the
stuff I had thirty years ago and that's dirt cheap :-). In constant
dollars I spent way less on the WJ than on my HW-100 back then.

That said, I have a lot more fun with simple one-mode ham-band-only (or
a few-ham-bands or one-ham-band) receivers. The most fun ARE just a
step or two removed from the most simple. While the filters on my HW-16
aren't nearly as tight as those on the WJ-8716, the receiver of my
HW-16 feels MUCH more like a "window on a slice of the 40M CW band".

Once you have some
experience with whatever you end up buying, you'll
have a standard for comparison, and will know what
to look for.

A decent older ham-band transceiver is a fine place to start. Lots of
radios from the 80's on are also general-coverage receivers.

My advice is to not only listen and use and look "upscale", but look
and try out "downscale" too. Some steps down will be too far (for
example, I really do not enjoy direct conversion receivers although I
appreciate much of their simplicity) but some other will be "just
right".

Tim.