[ARC5] OT? bc-348 bfo question

[Bill Cromwell]

Hi Fernando..
....Everybody,

"Impractical" or not has proven highly subjective. I have acquired some 
"junk" command receivers that were generously offered by some of the 
people who are closer to the "museum piece" part of the hobby and they 
asked only for the postage to send them here. The idea was I could use 
them as "parts mules". I straightened up dings and dents and removed 
some of the mods that had been imposed on the radios and I got *EVERY* 
one of them working again. A couple of them are looking pretty good! I 
also bought a couple of them at reasonable prices that didn't meet the 
former owner's wants. As you have said they still pull signals from the 
aether and they're fun to use. I get a feel for where they may have been 
and certainly for their purpose. I'm sitting in the warm comfort of my 
home but somebody else was cold and afraid while using some of these. I 
think of those guys.

During warm weather weeknds we have the garage/yard/rummage sales where 
people sell their 'castoffs' and surplus household goods for pennies on 
the dollar. I find old radios almost for free and take them home for 
parts. A good way to decide if the parts are good is to apply power and 
see if the radio works. Almost all of them work at power on. I hate to 
scrap them for the parts but nobody else seems to want them. Usually the 
plastic cases are cracked and broken. And -  I can only listen to one 
radio at a time.

For most of us radio is a hobby. Freshening an old radio can be time 
consuming and may need a lot of elbow grease. The severe accountants 
will charge engineering lab fees against that time and determine that 
the radio costs more than it's completed selling price and is therefore 
"unworthy". We can view those labor costs as the dollar value we 
received from our hobby instead of an expense that we didn't really have 
to pay. That 'money' never really changes hands anyway.

Keep them playing.

73,

Bill  KU8H

P.S.  If there are more hangar queen, junk radios available for the 
postage I'm up for getting some more of them playing again.