[R-390] R-389 Sold For $3550.00 on eBay

[Tim Shoppa]

> As much as I believe in Free Enterprise, etc, etc, and do feel that if 
> someone wants to sell an item, and someone else is willing to pay X 
> number of dollars for it, regardless of how outrageous that X number of 
> dollars might be, I feel that EBay has done one large disservice to the 
> Amateur radio/Milspec collector/Greenkey groups as such.

I dunno.  I've been having a lot of fun finding "old junker" transmitters
and receivers on E-bay in the few $ to a few tens of $ range.  These
are things that I wanted when I was a kid getting started in ham radio
but couldn't afford and are usually just as serviceable today as
they were back then.  A lot of this stuff stopped showing up at hamfests
20 or so years ago when (I guess) the sellers realized that they would
only get a few bucks, assuming anyone wanted to buy it at all, and
they were getting tired of hauling around the heavy stuff.

> There are a large percentage of sellers on there who are middlemen 
> (middlepersons?) and nothing more, like a bunch of vulturous used car 
> salesmen.  They know nothing about equipment, the use therof, or the 
> value, but they know how to write a good story.

Even when I was a kid, a certain fraction of hamfest sales was by
those who bought up the estates of silent keys real cheap from the
widows and peddled them.  Some knew something about radio,
but most didn't.  From what I can tell E-bay is pretty much the
same as the hamfests back then with regards to these sellers.

> The other problem is the "breakers", I have seen, as I know you all 
> have, perfectly good pieces of equipment chopped and sold as parts. 
> This, of course, always makes me wonder if, just like a chop shop for 
> cars, the stuff is stolen, or obtained thru nefarious channels.

It breaks my heart to see even a 60's or 70's era Heathkit (never
mind the high-original-cost-milspec stuff) chopped
up like this.  But it's also possible/likely that it hasn't been anything but a
"parts radio" for decades too, all it takes is one burnt-out part to
turn a "perfectly good radio" into a "parts radio" in the mind of many
hams today or a quarter-century ago.

Tim.