b8. About providing manuals

During the last 15 years it has been LA5QEA Ralf's and mine experience that providing manuals to radio amateurs, and using several hours of your free time is very little rewarding. The experience in over 80% of the cases we checked were bad. When we asked the person a year after if he had found the up to 100 pages of manual we sent him useful, the typical answer were "no, I sold it to another", and soon after another person called asking for a manual because the first person didn't care to keep the provided material so long that he could give it together with the equipment, he only had a vague memory of where he got the documents from.
In my opinion the tendency has been increasing during the last 10 years, and very often somebody couldn't express how much interested he was, but soon after the interest wasn't so much. In many cases it seems that they only need the manual to increase the value when they sell it in the next place.
It is of course exceptions, but during the last 30 years I have given away free tons of useful equipment and instruments from work, only to find it being sold a short while later, or dumped with the remarks that it was rubbish. in spite that many others were very interested to have it. To avoid such situations, all material are now provided via friends in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Nederland and Norway. It opens some possibilities, and still a lot of persons provides much of their free time to help me - so I really feel ashamed sometimes.

The possible solution is to have a copying shop to do the job. Call to ask a local shop what they charge for the job and request the amount paid before the copying start. This is often no problem for persons who really need the documents. Some documents are really hard to find, and of course, a technical skilled person does not need every page of a manual to trace where the fault is, he probably need only a smaller fraction and avoids all the 90% pisstalk which is written for the lesser technical skilled persons who need to be convinced to buy it.
I would rather like to provide some limited circuits on internet, then I don't have the problem of copying to two persons where either or one of them turns out to be a specimen of the unreliable sort. But unfortunately 50MB space on this site sets a limit.
My main interest is studying technical documents to find interesting circuits and comparing techniques of different ages.

circuit diagram pages 901
circuit diagram pages 902
circuit diagram pages 903
circuit diagram pages 904
circuit diagram pages 905
NEC 2m pager info d24
Magnetic 2m pager info d25

I am sorry to learn that the radio amateurs who would earlier be pleased to contribute to peace around the world and often give some equipment to friends are now much more concerned about making money in any respect. Still, it is my experience that it is more rewarding to give away equipment for free than have some louzy dollars which dissappears before you know. But you must know who you give to, the selection is much tougher today, and again - a larger part of my collection is collected from other friends. So I got to the following conclusion:

I enjoy collecting these items and I will show them on my website for others to
enjoy. I am not interested in selling them, however - please do not ask.
Instead, I hope to help others who collect this type of gear and would like to
hear from them.

994. Index of all technical notes on this site

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