QTH.COM Swap Chat

You need to be extra careful about buying Rigs on Ebay. I know there are a lot of good Hams disposing of gear on Ebay, but there are some who could care less what they sell.
I have run into several lately. You start asking questions and they start with I really don't know or I just don't have the time to check. My favorite I have been seeing lately is I don't have the cord so cannot test it. Check out thier other items for sale and completed sales by them and find they have been selling Ham Gear for months ????
My biggest complaint is the ones who take a perfectly good rig and remove the filters from it any way they can and list them seperately. They want as much for the "stripped" rig as it would be worth with all filters installed. The as someone put it " I am not going to be out bid at any price buyers" still purchase them. I would love to see thier faces when they find out it is going to cost them another $125 to $175 to get a filter.
Guess I am getting too old and Grumpy, or older and wiser one ???

Jim
KC4QLM

I recently went through with a deal where I traded a HF rig for some vintage equipment. The transmitter, D-104, VFO-which was said to only need to be wired with octal plug, receiver, and 6 ft rg-58 jumper. The radio I traded was plug and play-nothing needed and I thought that was what I was getting as well. Not the case. The VFO had been extensively modified to the point of no return. The D-104 was wired with a 1/4" plug. It had no bottom at all and the cord was too sort to rewire because it was up into the coiled part already. The transmitter had extension cord for microphone wire taped up all over the place and a huge choke. The ends of the extension cord wire had alligator clips that you just "clipped to the 1/4" plug on the D-104". Next the RG-58 jumper was not soldered hardly at all on the PL-259 center conductor which had some handy taping done to it as well. I E-mailed the guy and told him about the problems and he said that he had never used the VFO, but it sure did look pretty sitting in between the transmitter and receiver. Now after I bought a new VFO, bought a bunch of associated parts for numerous repairs, and about 18 hrs of work on the gear it seems to work fine.
The motto here is get extensive pictures front, back, bottom and top of every piece of gear. If someone doesn't agree to do that or "doesn't have a camera" it probably isn't worth having anyway!

From what I have seen , you need to watch some of the operators on QTH.com as well ! Not really much difference overall.