Jim Thompson’s eyewitness account of the St. Juliens Creek Annex surplus pile stands as one of the most vivid pieces of firsthand documentation in R-390A collecting history. His description of more than a thousand R-390A receivers stacked in an open pile — fifty feet square and six feet high, exposed to the elements and awaiting disposal — captured a moment that has become legendary in the boatanchor community. It is the kind of scene that makes collectors wince and dream in equal measure.

The Radio Works

Jim operated The Radio Works from Portsmouth, Virginia, a business well known in amateur radio circles. His proximity to the Norfolk Naval complex — including the St. Juliens Creek Naval Weapons Station Annex in nearby Chesapeake — placed him in the right location to witness firsthand the disposal of military communications equipment as the armed forces modernized and decommissioned older systems.

Portsmouth and the surrounding Hampton Roads area were, for decades, a natural hub for military surplus electronics. The concentration of Navy facilities in the region meant that vast quantities of communications equipment flowed through local surplus channels, and businesses like The Radio Works were well positioned to participate in that market.

The Surplus Pile

Jim’s account described visiting St. Juliens Creek and finding an enormous open-air accumulation of R-390A receivers — his estimate placed the count at over one thousand units, occupying a footprint roughly fifty feet on a side and stacked more than six feet high. The receivers had been exposed to weather, and the sale — which Jim dated to April 11, likely in the early 1990s — represented one of the largest single disposals of R-390A receivers in the civilian surplus market.

The scale of this surplus event is difficult to fully appreciate without context. Each R-390A weighs approximately 85 pounds. A pile of a thousand receivers represents more than 40 tons of precision communications equipment — the accumulated production of multiple contractors over years of manufacturing, all reduced to a surplus lot. For collectors today, who pay significant prices for individual receivers, the image of a thousand of them stacked outdoors is almost painful to contemplate.

Historical Significance

Jim’s account is valuable precisely because it documents a moment that was, by its nature, transient. Surplus disposal events were not typically photographed or recorded in detail — they were commercial transactions, not historical occasions. The participants at the time had no way of knowing that the equipment being sold as scrap-value surplus would, within a few decades, become highly sought-after collector’s items commanding substantial prices.

The St. Juliens Creek disposal also helps explain the provenance of many R-390A receivers currently in collector hands. Receivers from large surplus lots like this one often show the effects of outdoor storage — corrosion, water damage, and weathering that distinguish them from units that were carefully decommissioned and stored. Understanding where these receivers came from, and what they endured before reaching the collector market, is part of the larger story that Jim’s account helps to tell.

“Over 1000 R-390A receivers in a pile approximately 50 feet square and over 6 feet high.” — Jim Thompson, W4THU, describing the St. Juliens Creek Annex surplus pile