As I started getting more seriously into amateur radio, it didn’t take long before I began thinking that a newer and better radio might be a good idea. Until then, I had been using an older Yaesu FT-897D and a small Xiegu G90, but I wanted something more modern, more convenient and simply better for everyday operation.
My choice was the Yaesu FT-710. It is a modern SDR transceiver with a large display, waterfall, an excellent receiver and 100 watts of output power. New units cost around £1,000 in the UK, so I started looking for a used one.
I found one on eBay that immediately caught my attention. The seller said the radio had been used almost exclusively for receiving. That sounded promising because, if it had hardly ever been used for transmitting, the power amplifier stage should have had very little use.
The auction started at around £400. There was also a Buy It Now option for about £695.
I watched the listing for a few days. Eventually, I contacted the owner and offered him £650, saying that if he accepted the price, I would collect the radio in person.
There was one problem, though. The seller had only used the FT-710 for receiving, so he couldn’t guarantee that the transmitter was working properly. I therefore asked whether I could bring my own dummy load and power meter and test the radio when I collected it. He was perfectly happy with that.
Unfortunately, someone had already placed a bid on the radio. Once that happened, the Buy It Now option disappeared, and the seller decided to let the auction run to the end. All I could do was wait.
On the day the auction ended, the price was still below £500. I decided not to bid early. I set my maximum at £650 and placed my bid only a few seconds before the auction finished.
Then came the surprise. I won the auction for around £550. Even better, the radio came with a 30-amp power supply. Taking the value of the PSU into account, you could say that the FT-710 itself effectively cost me around £480.
I had to drive to Buxton to collect it, almost two hours from Birmingham, in the area between Manchester and Sheffield. When I arrived, I found that the seller was an older radio amateur. I actually felt slightly guilty because only two days earlier I had offered him £650. If he had sold it to me directly, he would have received £100 more.
But he had decided to let the auction run. That is how eBay works. Sometimes the final price goes far beyond what the seller expected, and sometimes it goes completely the other way.
The most important thing, of course, was checking the equipment. I connected the FT-710 to my dummy load and power meter and tested the transmitter and output power. Everything worked exactly as it should, so I packed up the radio and took it home. Once back, I could finally configure it properly and test it on my antenna.
The radio works perfectly. The receiver, transmitter, display, waterfall and all the main functions work exactly as they should. I haven’t found anything to suggest that the radio had been heavily used or that it has any hidden faults.
That same day, I managed to make my first few contacts with it. One of them was a conversation in Polish with Rafał, PA1RAF, a Polish amateur radio operator living in the Netherlands.
That was when I really felt that buying the radio had been worth it. Instead of paying around £1,000 for a brand-new FT-710 without a power supply, I had managed to get an almost unused one, complete with a decent PSU, for roughly half the price.
Sometimes it really is worth waiting until the final few seconds of an auction. If I had bid earlier, someone would probably have outbid me.