Veering OT Re: [Premium-Rx] The price of our Premier receivers

[John Green]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael O'Beirne" <michaelob666 at ntlworld.com>

>
> Will the price of our prized radios go up or down?  Tough one - it all
> depends on the maker, the condition, the rarity, the availability of spare
> parts and the general economic situation.  One has also to view this issue
> from a user or a collector's perspective.  There is no doubt that in a few
> years (arguably already) the electrical performance of our "big boys'
toys"
> will be overtaken by amateur products - vide the Elecraft K3 - but I
> personally much prefer a lumpy 19 inch box that cost a fortune to build.
>
!
> 73s
> Michael
> G8MOB
>

Just to add one other factor to Michael's interesting list of factors likely
to determine the future price of Premium Receivers - demand.  Or to be more
exact, the number of collectors / users likely to be interested in these
radios in the future, thereby creating the demand.

<Historical ramble on>

Certainly in the UK, the average age of the typical Premium Receiver
collector must be into the 50s.  I fit that profile and most of the other UK
contributers to the list that I know fit it as well  (you know who you are
:-)  ) .  In fact I'd say that the average age of attendees at the radio
rallys in the UK must be at least in the 40s.  I haven't been to Dayton for
a few years but from what I remember the situation in the US looked to be
similar.

I first got interested in radio at an impressionable age at school  in the
1960s when there were shops around selling WW2-surplus radios like the RCA
AR88D and lots of others.  Some of the radios Michael mentioned like the
Racal RA17 etc used to appear in adverts in magazines like Wireless World or
in black and white pictures of places like the radio astronomy labs at
Jodrell Bank.    The concept of actually owning one, given that they cost
the equivalent of something like the average yearly wage at the time, seemed
like an impossible dream.  Even more exotic were pictures of NASA facilities
gearing up for Apollo - racks and racks of really neat looking stuff!

The point I'm trying to make is that I think an interest in radio
communications in general and in Premium receivers in particular is to a
large extent a product of growing up in a particular era when these things
were, firstly, associated with 'exciting' events like the space race and the
cold war and, secondly, were effectively unobtainable.  Now that we've all
grown older and to some extent richer we can fill our house with the stuff
that's out there - all the stuff in those black and white pictures and what
came after it.

<Historical ramble off>

This is a roundabout way of saying I'm just not sure that the interest in
the Premium receivers we collect, discuss, tinker with and generally dream
about is going to transfer in any significant way to another generation.  If
that really is the case, prices are going to go down.

Getting slightly more on-topic, I'd echo Michael's point about the
performance of modern equipment that we wouldn't really regard as a premium
receiver.  The neatest single unit I own is the RFSpace SDR-14.  The
spectrum display from this tiny box blows the socks off what comes out of
most premium receivers.  OK, I know the performance of the SDR-14 as a
receiver in terms of all the parameters that get discussed on the list may
not be outstanding but looking at the spectrum display is fun!  There is a
vast amount of strange stuff on HF that is just a beep or a tone if you
stumble across it on a conventional receiver but it shows up as a chirp or a
sweeper or a hopper on the SDR-14 waterfall.

Sure the SDR-14 box doesn't look nearly as cool as a rack full of Racals or
WJs or whatever but I suspect the next generation, to the extent that they
are interested at all, will go for the SDRs in tiny boxes not the 19" rack
stuff.


Regards

John Green