"kram" ) writes:
......The stuff I deleted from your post, about how
you had a Zeus as a kid is intriguing, because while I came along about
a decade or so after it was produced, it always struck me as something the
average kid would only lust after, rather than own.

Michael VE2BVW


Since you are intrigued I guess I should explain further lest I give you the
wrong impression. I also came along about a decade later. I bought the rig
when I was abaout 16, used, in about 1973. This was the last years of AM
VHF in California. A year or two later I traded it in against a Kenwood
TS-700.

73,

WA6VCR

Ah.

And that's exactly what Jim was talking about.

Right at that point, the old tube rigs were pretty much seen as junk,
so people like us coming into the hobby could get them at great prices.
I brought home various rigs from the local ham auction and even people's
junk piles, played with them and then traded them off.

It was very cheap to get into the hobby that way at that point. You would
see it all the time in the photos in the ham magazines, young people with
older rigs and they had neat stuff.

It's only with the passage of time that the stuff became valuable, and
not to get newcomers on the air, but because people as they aged regretted
getting rid of their old stuff, when they were no longer using it.

Michael VE2BVW