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

[Larry Gadallah]

> ----- Original Message -----
>
> 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

This is a very interesting thread, and I've read similar discussions
regarding the future of amateur radio, homebuilt computers, CW, and so
on. The thread that links the interests of successive generations, I
think, is the concept of something new and unique to the generation in
question. So John's comments about the Cold War, Apollo program make
sense to me.

I don't own a "Premium-RX" anymore, but now I'm very interested in
SDR, and I'm using a Flex-Radio SDR-1000 (http://www.flex-radio.com),
a Quicksilver QS1R (http://www.srl-llc.com), and perhaps soon a
Perseus (http://www.microtelecom.it/perseus/) will be on the way. Once
you've grown accustomed to viewing a 500 KHz or 1 MHz span on a
regular basis, non-broadband radios make you feel like you are peering
down the end of a straw at a movie screen ;-).

I also think it's a little premature to write off SDRs as non-premium:
I agree with the points others have made that there is a lot of _very_
expensive Harris, WJ, and other equipment from the past 20 years or so
that _is_ SDR. All that has changed lately is that the building block
components for SDR have become very cheap, thanks in large part to the
Cellular Telephone and PC industries. Perhaps in the next decade some
of that initial generation SDR hardware will start trickling down to
the Premium-RX groupies.

Someone also commented that current generation amateur gear could not
compete with Premium hardware. I'd like to see a real-world test.
Field Day and multi-op contest stations are every bit as extreme of an
environment as a shipboard one. While I agree that there is far too
much widgetry and gadgets on some ham gear, not all of it is fluff.
There aren't enough Premium RX's up on Bob Sherwood's great
performance table at http://www.sherweng.com/table.html to prove the
point.

Cheers,
-- 
Larry Gadallah, VE6VQ/W7 lgadallah AT gmail DOT com
PGP Sig: 616D 4E52 CF1F 3FEC FFFB F11B 7DB9 C79A EA7E B25B