Things you're glad you didn't buy.

[Radio Wrangler]

8558 drift. About 1kilohertz/second when warm!

[Jez1234]

I have an 8558B in a 182T and as supplied by Stewart of Reading it drifted so bad I had to get them to take it back and fix it under the 3 month warranty. When I first rang them about it I was told "It's not a latest type digital you know, there will be some drift" to which I replied "but surely it's not meant to drift so a sinewave peak set to the RHS of the screen has drifted off the left side within 10 mins!".... "Ah.. no... pack it up and we'll have it collected from you, fix it and return it to you all FOC under the warranty". Which they duly did and it's been fine ever since. Indeed stability is not of quartz type accuracy but it is perfectly adequate when working correctly IME. Pity no built in tracking gen and the 8444a opt 59 being usually rarer and pricier than the actual S/A!

[G6Tanuki]

In times-past I was tempted to bid on MoD auctions of "stillages" of radio-stuff. This was when they were disposing of the old Clansman gear. You could get lucky and win a stillage containing 100 PRC320 radios, many of which were still working.

Or you could do what a friend did, bidding on a stillage of Clansman NiCd batteries. All non-working, meaning he had now become the proud owner of a cubic-yard of toxic waste.

My best 'win' was a strangely-and-worryingly-inappropriate UK Foreign-office disposal of a bunch of BID-rated CATAPAN encryption units.

Still in support with their manufacturer, we flushed them for prior crypto-fill then happily shipped them out to non-classified clients.

[bigfathairyvika]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Or you could do what a friend did, bidding on a stillage of Clansman NiCd batteries. All non-working, meaning he had now become the proud owner of a cubic-yard of toxic waste.

Did he have any chance at all to look at what he was bidding on?
Bidding on a complete unknown seems rather daft.

One thing I'm glad I didn't buy was a very old HP spectrum analyser, I think it was a 182 or something, definitely 70's thing, guy wanted 500 quid for it, someone else bought it and it packed up a week later.

[Welsh Anorak]

There are lots of cling-film wrapped pallets of electronic gear available under the 'customer returns' banner with vague descriptions from major companies.

One customer bought a pallet of twenty identical food processors, all with identical burnt-out motors, and another a pallet of new boxed TVs - all with broken screens which he sold to me for parts at a significant loss...

[Reelman]

My father-in-law used to attend the MOD auctions years ago and during the morning you could view the pallets and decide which ones you wanted to bid on. The contents were very variable and could be pure scrap or sophisticated kit in any combination. However by the time you came to bid any good bits of kit on the top of your pallet could mysteriously move to a rivals one.

I can remember the auctions being announced in the back of the Daily Mail up until the early 80s at least.

Peter

[ben]

Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak

There are lots of cling-film wrapped pallets of electronic gear available under the 'customer returns' banner with vague descriptions from major companies.

One customer bought a pallet of twenty identical food processors, all with identical burnt-out motors, and another a pallet of new boxed TVs - all with broken screens which he sold to me for parts at a significant loss...

I blame the slew of Youtubers/influencers posting videos drenched in hyperbole about how they made LITERALLY THOUSANDS off an Amazon returns pallet or lost mail packages job lot they paid 50 quid for. AMAZING HAUL!!?!! OMG!! (you get the idea). I suspect a lot of those auctions play on the greed and gullibility of people who follow the youtubers. We all know that most modern stuff is of ropey construction to start with, and electronics is largely irreparable, at least at component level.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by bigfathairyvika

Did he have any chance at all to look at what he was bidding on? Bidding on a complete unknown seems rather daft..

It wasn't a complete-unknown; it was three stillages of Clansman gear. Back a decade and a half the disposals at Witham SV were generally 'multiple lots' and they clearly mixed desirable-stuff with junk that was a total liability so they could clear the junk.

Yes, your 'lot' might have included 30 PRC320/PRC351 radios that you could sell-on for a couple of hundred quid each, but it also came with a pile of old batteries that were probably used in the 1991's First Gulf War and had spent the last decade sitting out in the open.