On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Fred Cameron wrote:

Due to recovery from surgery, I missed responding to an interesting
topic or thread a few weeks back lamenting the high prices for used
equipment; my experience on here and other sites is that the person
who asks for less than 50% of the new value for a piece of used
equipment is a rare person. Even still I have purchased items with
scratches and flaws that never were mentioned.

But we're not talking about used equipment here, we're talking about
old equipment.

As has been said before, go back about forty years, and you could get
all kinds of boatanchors for next to nothing. Everyone wanted SSB,
everyone wanted solid state, so the tube equipment, much of which
was AM, was virtually tossed away. I got all kinds of stuff in
the early seventies, played with it and then traded it off. Few were
collecting it, and those that were didn't have to pay much for a lot
of that. I really wish I'd kept that PMR-8 receiver, but at the time,
something else interested me so I traded it off.

That was the period when the boatanchors were still useful for
the beginner, as cheap equipment. And the cost was way lower than
fifty percent of the original price.

But forty years later, attrition has meant less and less of that
gear still exists. And forty years later, the people who tossed
it aside back then are regretting it, or wanting that equipment
they lusted after as a kid but which was too expensive (like that
Tapetone VHF receiver that may or may not have existed as an
actual product). They aren't looking for equipment to get on
the air, they are looking for equipment that reflects an era long
gone, be it amateur radio or their own lives. They are collecting.
Some will have extensive collections, others will have only a few
pieces.

So that keeps the price up. Limited quantity and relatively high
demand.

If people are looking for equipment to use on a regular basis,
they are looking in the wrong place, they need to find the buy
and sell newsgroup.

This is no different from anything else. I can still get copies
of Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" for fifty cents. But plenty of
books from the same era that never sold so well in the first place
now carry a premium price, far higher than the original cover price,
because people want them and they have to fight over a relative
few copies.

Michael VE2BVW