Hi all!
First, a little background on me.
I am a hobbyist in electronics (cybersecurity research is my day job, so to speak) and I've been finally working on getting back into the hobby and building myself a small lab. I've been acquiring test equipment and other things slowly this year, most recently a nice refurbished Tek 2465B scope that I have really been enjoying. RF is something I've always been interested in (I would like to get my ham license at some point too), so I've been looking at spectrum analyzers, including reading many older threads right here on this forum.
I really have a thing for top quality old test equipment, and I understand the risks of buying them now because of caps degrading and other reliability issues that can result in repairs and scrounging for old parts. One of my goals is to eventually acquire knowledge to work on things like this myself. So my question is primarily 2 things:
1) What are reasonable prices in 2018 to be paying for working HP "big iron" SAs such as 8566, 8568? Some of the ones I'm seeing on ebay seem to be very highly priced considering their age, even considering the instrument cost as much as a nice car or even a house new.
2) I understand that the low end modern SAs from Rigol and Siglent simply don't match up with the RF performance of the top end old ones, but what do I really lose as a hobbyist by getting one instead of going old, other than bandwidth? On the flip side, these are often seem to be around the same price as old HPs but you aren't getting as much for your money, at least looking at it from my perspective.
I guess as an addendum, I've also looked at stuff like the HP 8562A (which is portable, at least compared to the 66 and 68). Are these worthwhile?
Thanks!