[time-nuts] 5370A on eBay

[Chris Albertson]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Bob Camp <lists at rtty.us> wrote:
> Hi
>
> With reasonable credibility on the part of the seller (pictures and verbiage
> both make sense, seller rating is good, he sells test gear not comic books,
> etc) these have always been expensive. I've seen auctions close for anything
> between $400 and $1500. $600 is not an uncommon number to see. I've always
> found it cheaper to buy stuff like the current auction at $150 to $200 than
> to go for the fancier versions.

I've bought from both kinds of sellers.  If the guy sells mostly test
equipment and says it works and offers to accept a reurn then it
almost certainly will work.

The ones to avoid are the sellers who sell test equipment but claim to
"know nothing about this and can't test it".   This basically means he
tested it and it determined it is broken.   I believe the "know
nothing" claim if the seller is doing estate sales or runs a pawn shop
but not if he sells test gear

I don't know why the sellers don't bother to run a simple test.  They
can get $100 more if they were able to say something simple like " I
connected a signal generator set for 5MHz and saw very close to 5MHz
on the counter."  The simple statement would earn him $100 easy.

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California