[Milsurplus] Five dollar stuff

[Ray Fantini]

Perhaps the twenty dollar deal today is not the radio but the PC, it
appears that the government would rather destroy green radios and sell
them as scrap maybe with the Harris RT1446 sets flooding the market
being the one exception, there is always at least a dozen on their
online sale site. But PC are cheap and plentiful. With current Microsoft
requirements killing off just about everything under a P3  600Mhz system
all the 286 to 486 and P1 systems can't be given away. Over the last ten
years I have bought lots of laptops and sold them to people running old
DOS applications and for use in Ham Radio.
I particularly like the old Grid systems laptops, they use to sell for
only five or ten bucks on Ebay before anyone knew what they were, and
now rarely go for over thirty- although I have gotten way more selling
them as "vintage" systems with accessory's but there are still many
bargains out their on the military computers. Six years ago I bought a
pallet of fifty Grids for fifty bucks and resold most of them for people
running packet and APRS. Think their may be a couple more collectors of
this stuff around now then before but if your looking for something
equivalent to the ARC-5 thing maybe you should consider a first
generation PC or XT, I have a couple old IBM fifty-one hundred series
8088 systems and wear everyone may consider them useless just think
about it. That is the first of the series of modern desktop systems;
almost everything after was influenced by it, and was produced in the
thousands. Kind of sounds like an ARC-5 don't it.
If you want to see part of the Grid collection look at my web page at
www.ka3ekh.net
Ray Fantini