On Tue, 3 Dec 2013, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Tim Wescott wrote:
On Tue, 03 Dec 2013 08:10:26 +0000, Martin Brown wrote:

BTW is "boat anchor" the US term for tube based or old dead kit?

It's the term for old radios that glow in the dark and that you shouldn't
pick up by yourself for fear of rupturing something.

The rule is, to operate a radio on the 80M boatanchor net, it has to weigh
more in pounds than it produces out in watts. (Although there are occasional
arguments about whether plate input power should be used instead.) This
seems a fair line to draw between boatanchor and non-boatanchor sets.

I dunno if it's US or English-speaking amateur radio parlance, though.

That's the thing about amateur radio, everybody talks to one another so
the slang is mostly universal.

I've seen people point to an issue of "CQ" in the late fifties (when Wayne
Greene was editor), a letter or snide remark after a letter. I've seen
the bit, I'm not sure if that is the first use or not.

But of course, back then, "boatanchor" I think tended to mean "useless" as
well as "heavy". You drag this really neat thing home from the hamfest,
only to discover it is completely useless on top of being heavy. So it
has no value other than as a boatanchor. SOmething like that.

Amd there was surplus like that. Really heavy items with cases that made
them twice as heavy, and not really useful for much even with
modifications.

And then a decade or so later, a lot of stuff became "useless" because
nobody wanted AM and nobody wanted tubes, and nobody wanted whatever. So
the stuff, heavy but not extremely heavy, became boatanchors when few
wanted them. And you could get the stuff so cheap. I remember in the
early seventies being able to get ahold of all kinds of "junk" because
nobody wanted them at the time.

It was only later that "boatanchor" became an affectionate term, when
"that old junk" became desirable by people nostalgic for the old days, or
for the stuff they couldn't afford when younger. And by then attrition
had cleared out some of the supply, suddenly making the old stuff more
valuable than it had been decades before when nobody wanted it and there
was lots of it.

Michael VE2BVW