NASA Apollo Program Collector's Item: Hewlett Packard HP 8620C Sweep Oscillator

Description

This
Hewlett Packard HP 8620C Sweep Oscillator with 86220A 10-1300MHz Plug-in
is a piece of equipment retired from the
NASA Apollo Program
and has been in storage for 20 years since the original auction of Charles Bell's Estate in 2000.
The device measures 17" X 13 1/4" X 5".
From a news article on the original auction:
"When eccentric NASA inventor Charles Bell died, his rusting collection of space junk was sold at Cape Canaveral, to the amazement of space junk collectors. There are collectors, and then there was NASA electronics scientist Charles Bell. He picked up anything, and everything, especially artifacts from NASA dating to the 1960s. One day, he hoped to start a space museum. But the retired 57-year-old NASA design engineer of 37 years died Feb. 16 2000 at his home on Merritt Island, Florida. Bell's lifelong collecting passion goes public, when his amazing NASA cache and a few other things go to the auction block - at 10 a.m. today in Merritt Island. And to those who knew him, he was a collecting legend. Charles actually went out to launch sites and cut the pads down," auctioneer Dave Manor of Astor, Fla. said Friday, standing amid mountains of NASA pieces collected by Bell during the last 25 years. Bell's treasures are not catalogued, or organized. They are just there - thousands of artifacts weighing thousands of tons, worth millions. Lying heaped up in trailers and in the undergrowth, was the testament to Man's quest for space exploration, now rotting as scrap metal. There are two reassembled Atlas rockets and engines and parts from the Saturn, Apollo and Mercury during NASA's early days."