Bill Gunshannon wrote:

Well, I pretty much gave up on the "surplus" era decades ago
when I watched surplus Army teletype vans come into the local
surplus dealer only to be told they were not available. He
later went out of business. Hard to run that kind of a
business from a Federal Pen. Seems the government surplus
people in the states had learned they could get a lot more
money shipping them to South America and selling them to
drug cartels. I still often wonder how many AN/GRC-26/D
vans are sitting scattered around the South American
jungles now that they do business over sat phones. :-)

That's the thing about surplus. It's WAY more profitable to sell something
to someone who is going to use it for the original purpose than to break it
down for something else. If you part it out, people with the original items
needing repair parts will pay WAY more than people just wanting random parts
for projects.

So if you have a military buyer, you're going to make a lot more money than
you will selling to hams. The problem is that the paperwork is a whole lot
worse and the paperwork is kind of crazy. I know I had to sign a form saying
that I would not export my AN/USM-141 oscilloscope to a foreign country.

Today's drug cartel is tomorrow's legitimate government and vice-versa...
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."