[Milsurplus] State of the Hobby

Fri Feb 24 11:48:24 EST 2017

Good insight Ray! I must say that the “Good even Great” folks involved in OUR hobby far outnumber the other extreme. And indeed the current “technology” of social media makes getting answers and advice easy not to mention the ability to find a part for a 65 year old piece of hardware. 
I took a class ( with my son and son-in-law ) a few years ago to learn how to fly fish. It was a lot of fun and interesting but sort of like having a transmitter and no receiver. The fish never “talked” to me....

73 es hpe to work you on my T3, R390 one of these days!
Ron K3PID

From: Ray Fantini 
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2017 10:11 AM
To: milsurplus at mailman.qth.net 
Subject: [Milsurplus] State of the Hobby

“Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.” – Douglas Adams

If in your world you feel that everything is going to hell well then it is, everyone’s experience is different and I would not presume to speak for everyone but can only site my experiences. In the forty or so years that I have been doing this have seen all the excesses of the low life’s, have seen the abuse of family members in the case of estate sales and fests along with the extremes of people who have more than enough but won’t share or sell and the fools who refuse to take any form of loss and become hoarders. Don’t think there is any story of depravity or under handed dealing that after a while anyone in any hobby has not experienced. 

Have watched commercial sellers come and go, saw the local auctions at military bases develop and then be replaced by online sales and finally to what we have today with third party sellers conducting all sales, saw the demise of once great fest like Gaithersburg and Timonium and the rise of online email, list servers, Facebook and EBay along with the benefits and disadvantages they have wrought.

At the end of the day still have to say that for me I still find the good outweighs the bad, online sales and email and the ability to download PDF of almost any manual have created a scenario where what once was a huge and expensive process of locating and buying manuals has almost disappeared completely. Email and reflectors have allowed the free exchange of ideas and advice to a point of being almost instantaneous and where distance has no bearing. And many of the resources that were out there still exist like Dayton, Deerfield/Near-Fest and smaller fest like Frost fest and the world of online sales provides equipment from anywhere to our door step for the right price.

I make it a point to sell at Fest within a reasonable distance and also include Dayton that I drive some ten hours to get to. I like to buy at the shows but I also like to sell. The opportunity to deal with and talk to people has always had a great appeal to me but I have no problem in telling the low life’s that try to push their way in while your unloading the truck and set up to “Piss off” until I get set up. Also I have on more than one occasion informed people that they are not charging enough for an item and gone so far as to on occasion pay more then what they were asking because they were not asking enough.  Except in the case where you have people asking crazy high values for something because they tend to get aggravated when told that. And at the end of the day it’s there stuff they can ask whatever they want.

Don’t know exactly what it is that I am trying to say here except that maybe if your thru with dealing with the people involved that may be a sign of that you’re ready to try a new hobby or something different? There is always stamp collecting or Fly fishing but maybe at the end of the day the same thing can be said for the people there too. I can think of no hobby or avocation where you don’t have the exact same problems. 

Please do not read more into the above statement.  I am not telling others what to do or what to think. This is just the expression of free and open ideas and an attempt to say that at least in my opinion it’s not all bad news.

And let me echo Mr. Stinson’s statement as to apologies to all of the people on this reflector who I may have slighted, insulted or otherwise not responded to in a timely manner or perhaps not at all. It’s not intentional and I do stand accused of often misplacing emails, not responding for items that have been sent to me or often of wasting time and bandwidth in my irrelevant comments and ramblings. I received a personal responses once from one of the list members informing me of how when they see it’s a post from me that the just avoid the aggravation and delete it. But that may have been due more to my frequent misspellings and my never ending war with my greatest enemy The Homonym.  Maybe that’s a good policy! 

In order to use more bandwidth and further clog up inbox’s I would like to repeat a email I sent out this last Monday on the MRCA reflector about the passing of a member and estates in general, keeping in mind that estate sales will in ever increasing amounts be the source for much hardware in the days to come. After writing it and with the passing of W2OBR I was bumed about the hobby but with the show and sale at NEM tomorrow I am back up for it, link for the NEM Techno Swap Fest first:

https://sites.google.com/site/technoswapfest2/home

Repeat of MRCA email:

From: Ray Fantini 

Sent: Monday, February 20, 2017 5:03 PM

To: mrca at mailman.qth.net

Subject: W2OBR

At times I write just to express ideas, feeling and thoughts. This is one of those times.

Some people collect because they appreciate the design and utilitarian approach of the technology, others because it recalls a time when they had a connection to those items.

I collect because of Ham radio and a relationship to cheap, plentiful equipment that was available at one time and the effect that had on my life.

>From the end of the Second World War up to the early seventies there was an almost endless supply of cheap available surplus radio equipment. Many SWL, Ham radio operators, and aspiring Ham radio operators found modifying and operating this equipment provided a successful path to that end. I started with destruction of various radios until my first real working receiver, a BC-348Q and with a manual, soldering iron and well stocked junk box I learned a great deal working with and modifying that radio. In those years I had worked on and modified many radios with the idea at the time it was better to have a working example then a pristine example, but that was in the seventies when it appeared that the supply would never end. Well it did.

The vast numbers that once were available are likely to never be seen again. The result of this is that we find our collections moving more into the realm of buying and selling equipment from private owners as opposed to buying directly from the government and surplus dealers. I was selling BC-348 receivers at the Frost Fest in Richmond and had a stack of receivers and was surprised by how many Hams knew what they were and commented on how they once owned one. But the thing was that a number of the people looking to buy the receivers now want them as examples of pristine, clean unmodified radios. Nothing like the old days when people bought the radios with the idea that they would be using and modifying them. My comment to them would be “These radios are seventy five years old and in all that time have been owned by multipole people and it’s only natural that back in the past they would be modified and changed around to one degree or another” and being that I was selling them as parts or project radios they were priced accordingly, by the way I did sell all of them. I think my point in relating this story is that in today’s world there are no stocks of unmodified and all original radios that are going to be turned up by the government so if you’re a collector you can consider yourself buying form another collector or an estate. And perhaps that’s the real subject of my ramblings, this past week I got the news about Richie, W2OBR and we all have to face the fact that a lot of the equipment we see on EBay or at the Fest will be coming from estates. Fortunately Richie had plans in place for his collection, and those items are being taken care of. But it’s one of the things we all have to consider is what we want done with this stuff when we are no longer able to take care of it.  Today we live in a world where just twenty years ago we would never had the options that are available to us now, you can thin out your collection on sites like EBay or other online buying and selling sites. You can drag stuff to the Fest and sell in person or you can give it away to friends and associates but the key is to have a plan. If you don’t have a plan then others will provide one. Often this will involve people who may have little or no understanding of those objects.  

Richie had a plan and now his equipment will be going to the people who he chose in advance. The family has a mechanism for liquidating the estate and the equipment itself will live on. I am going to try to borrow Richie’s M151 and display it up at the MRCA Display in Aberdeen this spring.

Can think of no more fitting tribute then to have people enjoying seeing it after he is gone.

Ray Fantini KA3EKH

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
______________________________________________________________
Milsurplus mailing list
Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/milsurplus
Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
Post: mailto:Milsurplus at mailman.qth.net

This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/milsurplus/attachments/20170224/c7d04034/attachment-0001.html>