[time-nuts] GPSDO Alternatives

Arthur Dent golgarfrincham at yahoo.com
Thu Dec 6 13:27:21 UTC 2012


>On Mon, Dec 4, paul swed wrote: 
>Yes sir $139. But boy I have not seen cheap tbolts in  bit. As I recall
>$260 these days?
>
>On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 9:12 PM, Bob Camp <lists at rtty.us> wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> The gotcha is that you go from paying surplus prices to paying new prices.
>> New price to new price, they certainly are cheaper. Not so easy to beat a
>> $100 TBolt on price (if you can find one).
>>
>> Bob
>>
++++++++++++++++++++
Comments like these make me smile because they're kind of like the ads you 
used to see for buying $50 jeeps from DOD. Yes, someone at some time in the 
distant past had probably bought one jeep for $50 but these ads continued for 
decades like urban legends and a lot of people believed them. As to Tbolt prices, 
over the past year or so I had sold close to 200 Tbolts on the popular auction site 
at $170 each so I have a pretty good idea what the market was like during that time.
All the Tbolts I had were removed from the original equipment and tested by me so 
all the units I sold were clean and worked exactly as they were intended to work.  

If you watched the price of all the Chinese dealers over this same period last year 
they all went up in unison, first to $189, then to $260 as Paul mentioned above. 
What you would have noticed if you checked the actual units sold is that they were 
not selling any at those prices but buyers were getting their Tbolts from me instead.
I suspect that all the Chinese dealers are basically store front resellers for some 
distributor who set the price. As others on this list had commented, the condition 
of some of the electronic parts from China indicate that these parts like Tbolts and 
OXCOs were removed at some scrapyard by someone who didn't know or care 
what they were but was only interested in throughput and the parts were thrown into 
bins for later distribution and sale. Check the photos of bent and/or rusted OXCOs 
for listings 170950828042, 170558942064, and 300579197899 to see what I mean.

-Arthur



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