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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 |
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