Thanks Brad.
To Ronsradio, your thoughts about being around for the disposal of your collection are identical to mine.My good wife and I were deeply involved in the auction of a Bathurst collectors collection and it was such a good day I wouldn't want to miss another one!
Harold

I think your website and the forum would probably meet the selection criteria for archiving by the National Library http://pandora.nla.gov.au/guidelines.html

Obviously that doesn't solve the issue of ongoing running of the site but would mean the information held here isn't lost forever.

Which is important, as the current state of funding for museums isn't great, job losses all round. Which means there are less and less 'experts' retained by museums, thus communities like this one, and forums, become an invaluable source of information.

Erika

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Erika Taylor. Managing collections at the Tweed Regional Museum, Murwillumbah, NSW.

I did submit the site some years ago for possible inclusion in Pandora but oddly never got a reply. I never chased it up though I may try again one day.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

I've only been into ham radio a short time, but there's a saying that the best radio collection in the world is in the tip.

On Tuesday I was invited to a club members house to pick through a deceased club members
collection before it went to the tip.
Now this stuff had been sitting under the house for 12 months and other club members would have been through and grabbed all of the new plastic stuff.

I find it very interesting what people DO NOT see the value in.
You might think the "ham radio" stuff is irrelevant, but it's the same thing.
Noone here would walk past a Leak monoblock amp, valve tester, stacks of valve radios and valves
that you could take home with you, but choose to leave to rust under a house.
I'm the last to have gone through it, and feel it's me who got all the treasure.

...but there's a saying that the best radio collection in the world is in the tip.

Never a truer word has been spoken.

I remember an article in Electronics Australia once where a frustrated bloke seemingly couldn't find someone to inherit his wares so he dug a hole in the backyard and buried the lot. He even supplied a photo to EA for publication. The attitude made me sick I have to say.

As for what interests people, despite being somewhat of a niche, vintage radio has many aspects, much of which is covered by the 13 forums on this site though there are a few that are not represented and may well get a forum in the next growth strategy for the site and amateur (never liked the term 'ham') radio would be one to get the nod. Another would be transmission equipment. I have mentioned before that I was lucky to score a piped music system from the Royal Ryde Rehabilitation Hospital when they had a big cleanup in 1994 for accreditation. Gear like this is just so rare these days even if it doesn't do anything more spectacular than an average radio.

My main interest as far as collecting goes is timber radios from the 1930s and 1940s though most of my radios are Bakelite and I have a few plastic 1960s jobs.

I'm the last to have gone through it, and feel it's me who got all the treasure.

Yep, never ever miss moments like this. They just don't come up often enough these days.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

I didn't think you'd want to make more work for yourself, but if you want an amateur radio forum, I'm in a position to get it started There isn't any other specific vintage forum that I know of in Aus.
There are some sites, and a Facebook group, and an on air "AM Boat Anchor" net.

I didn't think you'd want to make more work for yourself

Apart from cutting and pasting some HTML code, nothing else to do.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Appreciate your efforts to provide a place to talk about radios even I didn't say that in the past.

Keep this going.