On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 08:39 AM, jac hil wrote:
The problem with P O Box is the battery in the VNA.
PO rules prohibit a lot of things that burn and record how the parcel was
shook in transit.
That is absolutely not true. The only restriction for Lithium batteries (or any other hazardous materials) is air freight. Nothing to do with a PO Box being the final recipient. The problem is not at the destination, but rather in the process to get it there. I have received many times various Lithium batteries for radios, cell phones etc, even the backup cell I needed to refit in my HP3468A DMM via my PO Box absolutely without any issues. Some of the bigger packages even had the Lithium battery inside sticker warning as required.
The ONLY valid reason to exclude a PO Box is if the shipment is being sent by UPS, Fedex, or DHL, which require a signature upon delivery, so they do not deliver to a PO Box address.
There are US based sellers on ebay (a lot of them chinese) that advertise shipping with USPS in capital big letters and still exclude PO Box on various smallish items, nothing hazardous. The reason is usually that they are drop shipping, and are not really the entity that will handle the shipping so they have no control over it, and are not even able to provide you with a tracking number, or just send you a fake one. Sometimes you end up with an Amazon box even tough you made your purchase on ebay. Been there seen it happen, now I steer clear of any seller that is US based that excludes PO Box. Something funny going on there for sure. Life is short why waste time with drop-shippers.
And as I said before, the PO Box address is my ONLY practical option for small packages. I am not in the US. I do have a street address as well, but only for freight cargo so it has a base charge and does not make sense for small items. Been doing mail forwarding for many years with 99.99% success rate.