[Eliot Ness]

......Does anyone have experience with the many CD's of the entire manual available on Ebay?

If you're referring to Rider manuals the very best are the high-res scans done by KE3GK:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/John-F-Riders-Vi...19d06f89e2

They cost a little more but the scan quality is fantastic.... in fact I'm thinking of selling my hard copies because his are so good.  If you want to see a schematic the seller will e-mail you one so you can compare before you buy. These are big files (4 DVD's) so I transferred them to my hard drive for much faster access.

Here are four samples for you to see the difference between the high res scans and the el-cheapos and freebies out there.


This first one are the el-cheapo Riders that have been converted. I've found the Riders that are free to download are the similar if not the same:

[Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v348/j.../cheap.jpg]

The next comes from a popular on-line source for individual free Rider schematics:

[Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v348/j...OnLine.jpg]

This is from Radio Data which are pretty good but no longer available:

[Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v348/j...ioData.jpg]

This last example is the high-resolution scans from KE3GK:

[Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v348/j.../HiRes.jpg]

Where the high-res scans really shine are when you want to magnify (zoom in) an area to read a component value, etc.  Some of the Rider schematics were poor quality to begin with so these scans won't correct that, but with the better quality of scans I can get by over 90% of the time now without digging out my big manuals.

Another issue is what happens on large fold-out pages.  Every other scanned copy I've seen, including Radio Data, chopped it into two pages with gaps of information missing.  I think KE3GK must have had access to a very large scanner because his come out as one large (and complete) page.