Equipment purchase advice.

Yesterday's office:

It's a Geodimeter 650 DR 200+ (1 arc second, reflectorless, robotic, running on SurvCE on a Nomad, with homebake radios) manufactured circa 2000, that became the Trimble 5600 series. It now resides here at Lat 17 deg south having bought it about 4 years ago through eBay from a retired USA surveyor (who posted a couple of times on this site). He said new, the setup was around $40k, which I can believe - it has things that have now been improved, but although we also run RTK which is 10 times faster and 10 times less stress, IMHO it is overall more satisfying running this one.