Either i am seeing things or an R1155 sold at auction today for just over £1,000 ?
Lawrence.
Thine eye-sight deceiveth thou not! Amazing - especially considering that the first bid was £19.00. :omg: The phrase "I
really want that! :P" springs to mind - or it evidently did in somebody's.
Al.
It's not for me to lecture others on how to spend their hard-earned cash, but the ludicrous thing is that the person who paid such a ridiculously over-the-top price for it will have been 'congratulated' by e-bay for having 'won' the item. You don't 'win' anything on e-bay - you pay the highest price that anyone is prepared to pay for that item at that time. The item in question is a commonplace piece of ex-WD tat, well enough made, but otherwise unexceptional. They frequently appear on the market at prices from £75 to £150 in various states of disrepair. Seems to me that the one who lost out on this auction has had a lucky escape. At the last NVCF, several good examples remained unsold at less than £200.
There was a series of articles in the long since defunct Short Wave Mag on how to strip an 1155 back to just the coils, tuning cap, dial and tuning drive and 'switchery' fit a new front panel with an S meter, fit a mains power pack, product detector and output stage, blanking off the octal valve-holders and fitting B9G valves. I spent many happy hours doing that conversion and the end result was a short wave receiver which was far superior to the 1155, which is little more than a bog standard domestic superhet, rushed into production for military use. Today, many will see that conversion as an act of vandalism but at the time, 1155s were often adapted by amateurs as short was receivers and the plethora of articles over many years from the 1950s - 70s on how to adapt the R1155 for such use is testimony to its shortcomings, other than for its intended purpose.
I did have an un-modded 1155 which I considered to be nothing more than a dust trap, so it was confined to the loft. When my younger son found out, I was as keen to off-load it onto him as he was to receive it and he has it on display in his 'hobbies room' with other bits of 'militaria'. I'm sure he'll be pleased to know what it might well fetch if ever he's strapped for cash and someone with more money than sense and a low gullibility threshold comes along on e-bay. I guess that like receivers such as Eddystones, most are now in the hands of collectors and tend to only come onto the market when they or their families sell up.
Scoffed and rambled Yorkie:D
I'm perhaps a bit perverse in my outlook, but to me, the appeal of vintage stuff is inversely proportional to its market price. The higher the price, the less I'm attracted to it, even though as often as not, I could afford it. I do have an Ecko A22 - a splendid receiver which I'd never have considered buying, but it was a 70th birthday present from my two sons - a very nice gesture, which was much appreciated, and an enjoyable restoration.
Good grief. I saw one listed the other day with mention of it still having DF fitted or something like that. Was this the same one?
Andrew
Hello, it was the price that struck me, hence the post, Al clarified for me that it did indeed go for that price, as to wether or not he/she paid over the odds who can say, I guess all these things can be subjective as regards "value" you could say that all they gave for it was a thousand bits of paper and if push ever came to shove what are a thousand bits of paper worth...not a lot, as was the case in post WW1 Germany, 28lbs of aluminium and copper would be worth a lot more maybe.
Although not my favourite receiver for SWL it is still very usable if up to spec and I enjoy using mine, I have always admired it's design given the remit and pressure and constraints this country was under at that time. I would have thought that given its original function it delivered its requirements well, I like the half frequency BFO and I would put the mechanical tuning drive in a similar league to that of the HRO as regarding mechanical simplicity, both employing mechanical mechanisms that were extremely efficient and simple in there design.
Intact DF section seems to be the rarity and seems to attract the highest money.
Lawrence.
(26-12-2011, 09:09 PM)Yorkie Wrote: [ -> ]You don't 'win' anything on e-bay - you pay the highest price that anyone is prepared to pay for that item at that time.
I know, I know! E-bay is an American operation, as as we all know, the American culture is distinctly binary: win/lose, right/wrong, can/can't, devoted ally/determined enemy, etc. Their culture doesn't seem to recognise 'analogue' at all. To us Brits., this all seems very strange, to put it mildly.
(26-12-2011, 09:09 PM)Yorkie Wrote: [ -> ]The item in question is a common-place piece of ex-WD tat, well-enough made, but otherwise unexceptional.
I did have an un-modified R1155 which I considered to be nothing more than a dust trap.
Thus speaks a Yorkshireman! Straight to the point; short, sharp sentiments; no messing about! No, but seriously David, I suspect that there are a lot of R1155 owners out there who would not . . . err, how can I put this . . . agree with you.
The R1155 has always struck me as a receiver that was built when materials, cash and development time were all very short. It was designed for a specific - not a general - purpose and it was clearly realised that the lifetime of one would obviously be short. Consequently, there was simply no point in putting in features and quality-of-build more than absolutely essential to meet its specific need. And since the anticipated lifetime was so short, maintenance, I suspect, was not in the 'design requirements'.
Many years ago, I owned one: I was not impressed.
Al.
I missed the "tat" bit....I guess that "tat" is also subjective, I live in a wooden house with a corrugated roof, the man on the hill might call it a shed and possibly tat but for me it's the best and he can go and stuff himself.
With all these old Comms. sets it is easy to pick holes in this that and everything else about them when comparing them to what we expect these days out of a receiver. I personaly find that there is a tangible link between these old sets and my parents generation, two of my ancestors/relatives, one from my Mums side and one from my Dads side took off from some now long forgotten airfield in Lincolnshire in Lancaster Bombers in two seperate missions, non of the crews returned on those nights. I would suspect that most of the ex wd stuff we encounter never actually saw action as such but there is still that connection with those days, days most of us have never had to endure and suffer through.
So maybe the old ex wd receiver is not tat after all, it depends on how we think about it and its past. Memorial or mess (tat) ?
Lawrence.
To be fair, the R1155 was indeed designed for a specific role, and fulfilled that role. It could indeed be argued that even though designed for rugged operational conditions, it was, if anything, over-engineered. You're right Al, about it's anticipated lifespan being short - the average life of a Lancaster or Wellington was no more than 20 weeks. Indeed, many never saw active service - the crews crashed and died in training.
The statistics are sobering:
A Bomber Command crew member in WW2 had a worse chance of survival than an infantry officer in World War I. By comparison, the US Eighth Air Force, which flew daylight raids over Europe, had 350,000 aircrew during the war, and suffered 26,000 killed and 23,000 POWs. Of the RAF Bomber Command personnel killed during the war, 72% were British. (18% were Canadian, 7% were Australian and 3% were New Zealanders. High in relation to the size of their populations, and of course all volunteers - not conscripts).
Taking an example of 100 airmen:
55 killed on operations or died as result of wounds
Three injured (in varying levels of severity) on operations or active service
12 taken prisoner of war (some injured)
Two shot down and evaded capture
27 survived a tour of operations
In total 364,514 operational sorties were flown, 1,030,500 tons of bombs were dropped and 8,325 aircraft lost in action.
Statistically there was little prospect of surviving a tour of 30 operations, and by 1943 the odds against survival were pretty grim with only one in six expected to survive their first tour, while just one in forty would survive their second tour. For much of the war, about 1 in 20 aircraft would, on average, be shot down – although obviously there was great variations - on some occasions the loss rate exceeded 10% – sometimes much higher than that.
But I guess that despite its limitations, the R1155 has become something of an icon of WW2, and since during the post-war years when the surplus market was awash with them, the 1155 had no useful purpose other than as a 'donor' receiver to be licked into shape for SWL/Amateur use, I guess that few now remain in unmodified condition. There would have been no purpose in buying one as an 'ornament' so the minute it was acquired, out came the Black and Decker drill and a pair of snips to hack out all the useless gubbins such as the DF section, magic eye and so forth, to make room for a PSU and output stage and turn it into a basic short-wave receiver. Happy days, when impecunious amateurs (many of them ex-Services) prided themselves in how cheaply they managed to get on air, rather than how much they've splashed out on the latest 'state of the art' (soon to be obsolete) plug 'n play offerings from 'Kenyeasuicom'. I doubt that it ever crossed anyone's mind that one day, people would pay humongous amounts of money for one as a 'collectors' item. Who'd have thought it - a grand for a 'dust trap'!
It could make me cynical!:D
These days, as I wander through shops in the high street, magazines, e-bay, 'real' auctions and such like, it is very apparent that there is a growing demand for the 'products of yesteryear' - and ex-WWII receivers and such-like are no exception. As far as we, here, with our collective interests are concerned, this has to be a 'good thing'. Not only does this resurgent interest reduce the number of old radios (of all types) from going to into the skip, but keeps the knowledge of valve technology alive. About one year ago I was in the company of some of my wife's ever-so-literary friends. When I was introduced, "Oh, so
you're the radio expert!" came the thinly-disguised & admiring response. Many years ago, the tone would have been more along the lines of "Oh no! Not
another weirdo anorak!"
Al.
Ours is one of many hobbies and special interest groups that have benefitted immensely from the advent of broadband internet. For many years, if we wanted a circuit for a radio, all we could do was to place a small ad or letter in a magazine seeking a photocopy, or go to the library hoping that it might feature in the R&TV books in the reference section. To take the R1155 as an example, there is a plethora of information on internet on every facet including total restoration. In addtion to countless excellent websites, there are such things as the 'Boat Anchors Manual Archive', Eddystone User Group, the BVWS, the MARS etc, and of course, let's not forget this forum!!