I'm glad that set went to Dave because he's a good guy and will put it to good use.
It's weird how treasures like this come to light. This sale was in an affluent area and the only advertisement was on estatesales.net. The ad listed, among other things, amateur radio equipment. There were no pictures and no mention of an antique TV.
I was there early on the first day of the sale. From the odds and ends in the basement, you could see that the owner was a ham and a tinkerer but it appears that the stuff had been cherry-picked before the sale. For example, the only SW or ham receiver on the premises was a rusty old Coast Guard VLF receiver from WWII. There was a transmitter but it was home-brew, seven feet high and weighed a ton. I can't imagine how you could remove that monster. (I would have loved to have the rack that the transmitter was mounted in because I could have fit at least a half-dozen boatanchors in it!)
There wasn't a lot of super-old stuff in the rest of the house so it doesn't appear that the home owner had been the original owner of that pre-war TV. It would be interesting to know how he came to own it. Just to add to the weirdness of the entire scene, this guy also owned a huge modern flat-screen TV. He had audio equipment, too, but it was Realistic stuff, not high-end stuff.
By the way, this article states that only 17 of the Andrea 1F5 sets are known to have survived. I guess Dave's is No. 18.
http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...andrea/1f5.htm
Joe Connor