I have a couple of spec-an's and VNA's in the middling price ranges ($500-$5000 ea) and was scrimping on the connectors, cal standards and cabling.
One day I was browsing the most popular auction site and found some 3.5mm components and was curious. Looking at the seller I discovered it was an electronics recycling center about five miles from my house.
I called them up to see if I might be able to stop by and see what they had sitting around their warehouse. It was a big place and they had a bunch of minimum wage folks chopping off the gold leads, tabs, etc.. from electronic devices and sorting by metals and putting it all in bins. It made me sick to my stomach to see a stack of HP test equipment reduced to chopped up pieces to get after anything that was gold in color.
I wandered around in the darker recesses of this warehouse and found giant wooden crates filled with small electronic parts. They had a shipping address as coming from one of the major universities in Alabama. It looked like they had taken the entire tools, test equipment and parts boxes out of the RF labs and just sent them off for recycling. I scavenged through this giant wooden crate (four feet high and probably eight by eight feet inside. I had to climb on top of other equipment to get inside.)
I was not prepared that trip to be digging through the dirt and electronic flotsam that day but I kept at it for about two hours. I also found one of those black, conductive-plastic bins that we use to hold PCB's in manufacturing. I filled the bin up with about ten pounds of every imaginable RF component; little circulators, return loss bridges, more than a hundred SMA attenuators, biconical antennas in the microwave band and half-completed project boxes with SMA connections on each end and space for components to be soldered in the jig.
I took it all up to the front desk and the receptionist was prepared to count each part and sell them to me... I left the dirt and grub all over them and looked a complete, dirty mess when I walked in to her office. She was reluctant to even touch the box. I said "how about I give you $150 for the entire bin?" She immediately said YES (anything but to not go digging through that plastic bin of dirty stuff).
Taking it home I inventoried what I had; About 2/3 was still good. APC-7 connectors and adapters still in their plastic tubes, SMA and 3.5mm, attenuators, fixed and variable, delay lines.. I threaded them all together end on end and it was more than two feet long of just attenuators. It all just needed a good cleaning.
I still have my 'protected' cal standards for when I do real-work but I make use of the pieces-and-parts on a regular basis.
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One thing I saw when I was leaving the building was a giant stack about ten feet tall of wall sections for Lindgren Faraday cages. I only had my car and by the time I got back there with my pickup truck a few days later they had stripped all of that down for the copper mesh and threw the rest away.
The place is now out of business; Like all electronics recycling centers they seem to follow a seasonal circus route and move to a new town.