You have to see if they sell Brian. There’s a TR2300 “electric handbag” for sale starting at £50 (plus all the new buyer’s premium nonsense). It has a soft case and power cable. No mic, lights faulty and transmits/receives. The power cable makes it unique, the first I have seen with a power cable in 20 years. But £50 for a late 70s 1W 25kHz FM radio. Or buy it now for £95! Madness. I bought mine for £5 10 years back. There’ll be at least one on a stand at Blackpool. And a 290 with a duff dial light.
Or how about a FRG-7 starting at £180. They were “all right” for the day but £50 is a more than sensible price.
The down side of buyer pays the listing fees means it costs nothing to list so people will list more and more and what ever daft price comes into their head. When the seller had to pay a listing fee whether it sold or not, sellers mainly listed at sensible prices.
True but that a reflection on modern times which as you are a more recent ham you wont have seen the glory days of rallies BI (before internet).
The only places to list items for sale was your local club noticeboard or the classified sections of Radcom or Pratically Witless. You had to take a chance buying from an advert where maybe you would not get what was described. So this meant there was sufficient volume of radio gear (and surplus/scrap/gizmos) for sale that rallies thrived. It was such that there was one good rally a month Lancaster, Oldham, Bury, Blackpool, Elvaston Castle and Drayton Manor (both outdoor) Llandudno., Barnsley, Leicester. So much stuff you could see and fondle and bargain over.
Then along comes the internet and eBay etc. and suddenly you didn’t have to wait for the next rally and lug stuff about. all your tat and junk could be listed and you just waited for people to peruse and buy. The rot started in 2000 and by 2010 most of the smaller rallies were gone.
I looked at selling my FT818 to the dealer I bought it from - they offered me £300 in part ex if I bought a new TX-500 from them. I didn’t bother selling to them of course; after all the fees etc, I received almost £600 from the eBay sale of it. I appreciate they have to provide warranty/after sales, but even so, their offers are pretty disappointing at times…
I suspect they make more from used sales than new. I imagine new will be controlled by the manufacturer, and perhaps capped at 30% to the dealer, vs. potentially 100% from trade ins.
I was maybe blunt and harsh, I personally have no trust for some of the ham radio stores in the U.K. Like all things in life if you do the work you get paid - paint your own bathroom vs. paying someone to do it. Sell your rig privately vs. trading it in.
The internet has increased the audience you can reach - great for the seller, less so for the buyer.
I’d love to go to radio rallies of BI, I think Elgin still does one and that’s “near” me. I’d probably end up spending more than buying on eBay though…buying things I didn’t even know existed but now that I’ve seen them, I need it!
The BI radio rallies were great. I lived on The Wirral and so rallies from Cumbria to the Midlands were my stamping ground. There were others for “daaan saarf” or over in the far East of the country. The big ones were Blackpool/NARSA in Spring then the two massive outdoor ones at Drayton Manor Theme Park and Elvaston Castle country showground (Derby). The big Autumn one was Leicester (big enough to run for 2 days).
Elvaston Castle had 4x huge marquees of traders and private sales were on outside tables. I think in the years I went there was one wet Elvaston and that was rally just some heavy showers. You can’t imagine just how much stuff there was there simply because selling it elsewhere was hard work and there were so many visitors.
Sure there’s a strong touch of rose-tinted glasses about times from my youth especially as many of the people who I frequented the rallies with are no longer alive. It was always possible to fill the car seats with fellow hams… “you drove us to Leicester last year so I’ll drive to Drayton this year” and so on.
What I missed out on and you probably need to speak to people 10-30 years older than me to hear what the WWII surplus shops were like in Lisle Str/Tottenham Court Road from the late 40s till the early 70s. Proops, G.W. Smith (radio) Ltd., Premier, Henry’s etc. Up till the late 60s (maybe later) you could still find brand new and unused WWII 19 sets or R1155 in their wooden crates wrapped in waxy paper.
So yes, the internet allows many vendors and many buyers to meet easily. To me and I sold lots and lots of stuff on eBay, it seemed better when the seller paid the eBay fees. I always factored in the sales and shipping fees into the price and was always happy with what happened with the sales. It just seems really rather poor now.
I keep hearing that home construction is much harder than it used to be. I think it’s much easier. The internet allows access to masses of information and it’s possible to get all the components you need from RS, Farnell, Mouser etc. Modern components are often surface mount but SOIC and 1206 are really easy to solder. Making surface mount PCBs is much easier as you don’t need to drill holes for all the components. And you can get them made cheaply too. In the past you would struggle to build a stable VFO but now with a cheap microcontroller, si5351 oscillator, a rotary encoder and a display you have any frequency combination you need.
I passed the RAE in November 1982. Looking at Short Wave Magazine from that month you could get a Yaesu FT707 HF rig for £569. According to the Bank of England that’s £2393 in today’s money. Today you can buy a Yaesu FT710 for £985. A far superior radio for less than half the price.
True. But you can’t apply inflation to electronics as the cost has dropped massively compared with inflation. In 1969 a new 22in colour TV was about £350 (a lot of money) and the Transit van that delivered it was about £650. Today you can get an average 40in LCD TV for £150 and the same Transit van will cost £41000
You’re right on the ease of home building. Quality components available cheap, cheap software for design, cheap production of PCBs which was unheard of when you did the RAE. It’s easy to build quite clever things for not much money which was impossible when I started building things with 1/2W carbon composition resistors and AC127s etc.
I’m not so sure! In the 1960s I built a double conversion superhet receiver based on a commercial ham bands front end. Tag strips, tag boards, B9A, B7G and IO valve holders, there was hectares of space to work inside the chassis and it went into a nineteen inch rack cabinet. The hardest part was the metal bashing, ruddy great holes to gnaw out for the mains transformer and the Eddystone drive and no need for a jewellers loupe to see the component values! Then I had to build a 2m exciter, a 70cm tripler-amplifier (the first four years of the B licence was 70cm and above) and an AM modulator, all gargantuan by modern standards and so easy to work on - allowing for the hefty silver plated output tuned lines from exWD gear! Today I have the knowledge to build gear that would tremendously outclass anything I made in the 60s, but no longer have the steady hand and keen eye that it would need. For me things have become harder, not easier.
Its easy to compare - find an ancient Camm’s Comic and from it build an OVO regenerative receiver based on a 1T4 and then a modern equivalent based on a mosfet, the old design would be a doddle to wire up compared with its modern equivalent!
We’re not talking about any one person and the effect age has on eyesight or fine motor skills (something I see happening to my body as I age), we’re talking about what can be achieved in a home environment now.
e.g. Go and make a GPSDO 10MHz source and a 54MHz to 6GHz signal source and the controller out of B9A valves.
I think you missed my main point, Andy, which is that physically the old hollow state designs were easier to build.
My first projects were built with a plumbers soldering iron heated on the gas stove, the bit was nearly the size of a pepper pot. You would have difficulty doing that with one of those dinky little CW kits today!
Under the VAT Margin Scheme, dealers should only apply VAT on the profit element of their transactions, and accurate records should be kept.
“Should” …
I have personally encountered now forgotten occasional examples where that does not quite seem to have been the case and when challenged they refer to the accounting department and affect some confusion. I am guessing this may be more frequent than one would suspect. I have distinct recollection of a Snap-On dealer doing that too.
Since I have became licensed I wanted to make a power/linear amplifier, as several people had in the past made one for the Intermediate Exam project. I did have the plans for a 50w one but it could no longer be built as a chip that was required was no longer produced. I did meet someone up on Shining Tor a couple or so years ago, and he had a small 20W amp which possibly smaller than a Coke Cola can, which I believe was homebrewed (not the Coke!!!).
