Advice for Selling Used Test Gear Online - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: tec5c
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2014, 01:34:00 pm
content: Hi all,My home lab has been gathering a fair amount of test equipment over the past couple of years. Some of the stuff I have bought, and some has come from my workplace (it was written off due to no longer being used/being upgraded) I am running out of room and am in the process of doing a clean up.My question is, I've never sold electronic test gear before and I want to make that I go about it the right way.Some of the gear is known faulty, other stuff is I guess you would say "unknown condition". Now gear that appears to work 100% correctly to me, may actually have a minor fault somewhere although some of this stuff is beyond my knowledge (network analyser, vector signal analyser etc) Would my best bet be to just put them up as "powers on, passes BIT tests..."I'm still a bit hesitant as to whether or not to sell some of this stuff. (net. analyser etc)Any advice?

author: KJDS
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2014, 01:50:55 pm
content: It's worthwhile doing some decent testing on as much as you can.Obviously if it's a complex but obsolete old logic analyzer then it's not worth spending a day testing it, however if you have a vector network analyzer it's definitely worthwhile putting in as much effort as you can to find out how well it works, eg a 20 year old 3GHz HP8573C is still worth £4,000 if it is working ok. If it's just powering up then it's worth only half that.If you can find some model numbers I can give you an idea of the best way to test them.

author: tec5c
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2014, 03:47:55 pm
content: The network analyser is something I am considering selling. As I'm only in the second year of my EE degree I don't really have much use for it, and have hardly turned it on in the 18 months or so that I've had it. I'm a little hesitant to sell it though as I don't know what the future may bring. Either way it wouldn't hurt to ensure it's fully functional. The model number is 8753a.Thanks for the reply.

author: JuiceKing
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2014, 04:04:37 pm
content: User and/or service manuals usually have performance testing procedures. If you have the equipment and time to run through them all and the gear is in spec, then you can say so and that would carry a lot of weight. These performance tests can be pretty involved and call for calibrated and/or obscure gear to do properly, but it's better to run the tests you can and state the results.

author: G0HZU
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2014, 08:42:55 pm
content: Quote from: tec5c on July 04, 2014, 03:47:55 pmNice VNA...I can remember a time (25 years ago) when our HP8753A was one of the (then small) company's prize assets. A fantastic piece of test gear I felt privileged to have daily access to.Back then it cost more to buy than a fairly decent house! To get the best from it you need to be reading raw data from it over GPIB to allow the creation of S1p and S2p files in a PC. This way you can create user models of real components etc.Maybe you have already covered this stuff in your degree course but if you haven't then it would be good experience to play with the HP8753A a bit more before you decide to then sell it.