- 2025
- Sep
- 29
Pictures from the 2025 Cleveland Hamfest
This was the second year I attended this show, and it was just as good as last year. While the stuff I like is generally going away (there’s just no more of it,) and some of the same vendors show up everywhere - there was still plenty of good things to see. I managed to make it out of there with only $40 missing from my wallet, so I did good.
Here’s what I saw at the show:
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Next up is the Early Television Museum fall swap meet in October (no idea on this one, I’ve never been there,) followed my MARC@MAPS and finishing the year with the (disappointing last year) Fort Wayne show.
I’ll probably use this year to make some determinations about which shows I want to attend next year. Some of this years’ shows have been smaller than usual, and seeing the same stuff over and over isn’t interesting. Who knows, but stay tuned for more photos from events and next year’s list.
- 2025
- Sep
- 29
Random board shot: A Biamp electronic crossover
Today’s board comes to you from a resale shop. A friend purchased this (used) electronic crossover for his audio stack, and wanted to open it up to give the controls a cleaning and give it a general once-over. Inside was a well laid-out board with plenty of space and a bunch of antique RCA op-amps. The unit works great, and immediately went into the stack.
However, seeing as this was made in the 1980s right here in the USA, we looked for that one particular mark:
Yep, there it is. That orange script “T” indicating the raw board was manufactured at the GE plant on South 2nd Street in Coshocton, Ohio.
How many stories could the board manufactured there tell us?
- 2025
- Sep
- 24
The Cleveland Hamfest - Cuyahoga County Fairgrounds in Berea, OH - Sunday September 28th
There’s a hamfest happening in Cleveland this weekend. I went to this one for the first time last year, and came away impressed with the size and number of vendors. It’s certainly worth your time if you’re in the area, so check it out!
The Cleveland Hamfest and Computer Show
Cuyahoga County Fairgrounds, Eastland Entrance
160 Eastland Rd
Berea, OH 44107
September 28
8A - 12P
https://www.hac.org/
See you there!
- 2025
- Sep
- 18
Modifying the Ikea Inspelning smart plug for always-on operation.
Disclaimer: This involves working with high voltages and high currents, and is a device that you’re going to plug in to a wall outlet and leave there. Make sure you’re comfortable working with this kind of stuff before proceeding! This is a guide and you need to know what you’re doing beforehand. If you don’t - don’t! Mistakes can destroy property and kill you.
Ikea is one of the oddest stores I’ve run across. Known for their flat-pack furniture, they also have a line of relatively friendly and cheap technology devices that operate on common standards. One of these devices is a smart plug called the Inspelning (translation: recording.) It’s available in multiple countries with different outlet formats, but the one I’m going to be concentrating on is the North America version.
This is a generic ZigBee compatible device that offers both remote control via their own hub and other compatible devices, as well as providing both power consumption and line voltage monitoring functions. It exposes these via Ikea’s own application, or by entities within Home Assistant or some other smarthome system. I’m using Home Assistant, and these have no issue integrating and exposing all information.
So what’s the modification?
These are cheap devices at ~$13 - and you’re not going to find something with a power monitor that’s much cheaper. But…they can also turn on and off, which means if you’ve connected something that relies on being powered on all the time, having an accidental trip that shuts it off could be problematic. My modification is to make the device permanently on. This also has the effect of preventing premature power supply failure, which can cause relay issues and seems to be a common failure mode with smartplugs in general as the components inside are as cheap as you can get. I want a power monitor, not a remote plug, and this is a way to do it.
First thing is to get the device open. These are relatively benign, and are just clipped together. There are 6 plastic clips - two on the top and bottom, and one on each side. I don’t have any pictures of opening because it’s not a picture friendly process, but here’s how I did it:
You’ll need some sort of opener tool. I used iFixit’s blue spudger tool to pry a bit of the top of the case back at one of the clips and then pry up the gray plastic face. I then used one of their “guitar picks” to hold it open while I used a butter knife to pry-pop the rest of the face off. If you’re careful, the gray plastic should deform enough to release the clips on the sides.
I tried using the spudger to go all the way around, but the sides are simply too curved to get a good entry point, and not flexible enough to pry. I wouldn’t try this with a device that’s been around for a while, but a new device should have enough flex left in the plastic that you’re not going to break anything. Try not to insert anything in the lower part near the ground hole, as there’s a piece of circuit card that sticks up in this area.
Once the face is off, it’s relatively simple to access the circuitry.
First, remove the ground lug assembly. This just falls out, as it’s set in a hole. Set it aside. This isn’t connected to any of the circuitry inside, so if you needed a two-prong device to replace something like an old X10 two-pin appliance module, this is the way you could do it. I don’t suggest you do this, however, as modern outlets are all grounded.
I’ve named the various parts, but we’re not really interested in anything but the screws. These are extremely shallow philips screws, so you’ll need something to fit them. I didn’t have the right kind of driver handy, so I just used a thin blade flat to catch and back them out. Don’t apply a lot of force to these, they’re really cheap and wanted to destroy themselves.
The other parts here are the relay itself, the zigbee control board, the current monitor board, and the power supply filter capacitors. Chances are the latter would need replaced if you encounter a situation where the relay chatters or becomes unreliable, but that’s not a given and outside the scope of what is being presented here.
Push up on the plug tines to move the board to the top of the case. There are little pips that help keep in inside, you may need to gently wiggle to get it out. Avoid pulling on the control boards.
The back of the board reveals what we’re after.
There are two large soldered pads on the left of the board. This is the area that the relay connects when it closes, and connects the hot tine to the hot receptacle on the front of the board. The current monitor is in the neutral line, and is always active so it doesn’t matter if the plug is “on” or “off.”
We’re going to jumper across the hot line pads to create an always on loop. You can still activate the relay at this point, but it will do nothing.
CAUTION - you’re working with something that’s going to be plugged into the wall and will be conducting a potentially large amount of current. Make sure your connections at this point are well-soldered and using a properly rated gauge of wire. A half-ass connection won’t do it here.
I’m going to use a piece of 12ga solid from a strand of THHN. I’ve cut a section and bent it around a pair of needlenose pliers, then trimmed it.
Why a U-shaped piece? Mostly to give plenty of area to solder. You don’t want this thing coming undone inside the case, and the solder is going to be part of the 120VAC conduction area. Err on the side of caution here, give yourself plenty of area that’s soldered to and touching the pads.
Make sure you have a good fillet all the way around the jumper.
Note - you’re going to need a decently hefty iron to do this - your little 20W SMT iron won’t cut it. A good 35W with a flat tip should work, but I used my 80W iron. Make sure your wire is pre-tinned and put a little solder down first. It will probably take a bit of doing to get a good placement, but make sure your wire has a good fillet all the way around, and is centered well in your pads. Don’t let any solder or wire drift off near components.
This should be good for at least what the relay offered, probably more since that relay is about as cheap as you can get.
Assembly is, of course, the reverse of disassembly. Install the board, the ground lug (make sure the flat is lined up properly with the area meant for it,) the screws, and snap the face back on. Do a quick ohms check between all 120VAC connections to verify there’s no shorts, and if good - plug it in and connect it to your smart devices monitor system.
I added mine to my test devices area and got this:
It’s reporting no current draw (other than the dithering these show) and is correctly reporting line voltage. The plug is not “on” as this point, although you can clearly see it still understands the button press. I suppose you could use this as some sort of scene selection if you wanted.
That accomplishes what I set out to do. While there are a few companies that provide non-controllable devices that do the same thing, this is by far the cheapest way of doing it.
One final note, Ikea has announced that they will be discontinuing the ZigBee devices at some point in the near future, in favor of Matter. I assume that just involves replacing the control card, but who knows. Get them while you can!
- 2025
- Sep
- 14
The 2025 Central Pennsylvania Hamfest
This was the first year for this show, and had maybe a dozen vendors on the fairgrounds. Turnout was pretty good, there were a number of people coming in during the time we were there.
Some of the vendors were ones you’ve seen from other shows, including some from the recent Findlay show. Because of that, I didn’t take very many pictures.
This nice dual range Weston voltmeter was at the club’s table. I usually pick these up when they’re cheap enough because they’re useful just about anywhere.
I wasn’t sure what this one radio (with the two dials and the center meter) was, but it looked really interesting. I didn’t need a shelf queen. however.
One vendor had a number of tubes for sale for $1 each. I took 20 of them. He also had this box of what we thought were Toyota manufactured tubes, but turned out to be pulls in Toyota spark plug boxes. Fooled us!
There was a handful more of vendors with the usual hamfest things. Overall, it was a nice little local and worth the time for us to go. If they hold it again next year, we’ll probably head over.
Next show is Cleveland at the end of the month. If this one is like last year’s show, it’s a good size show that offered a lot of stuff to see. See you there!
- 2025
- Sep
- 8
Johnstown Swappers Day 2025
This probably should have been inserted before the Findlay show, as it happened over Labor Day weekend. But I’m a lazy piggy and didn’t get it posted in time, so here it is!
Swappers Day is a general flea market that happens over the Labor Day weekend. By general, I mean it’s all kinds of merchandise - but it started out as a sportsman’s club show, and you still get a lot of firearms and bows being sold. Kind of a strange mix of things.
A lot of general antiques also show up, and that includes electrical gear. However, this is an opportunity to take photos of all kinds of interesting things, and here’s what I saw that caught my eye:
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Not much else to say about this one, but more shows on the way!
- 2025
- Sep
- 8
The 2025 Findlay Hamfest
The Findlay Radio Club Hamfest is usually a pretty decent show. It’s been shrinking somewhat over the years, which is unfortunate, but there seems to be a lot of ‘fests in Ohio these days. Perhaps that, and the general aging of the population / equipment getting older and not having more made is starting to affect who and what shows up. No idea, but this years show was probably about 3/4 of the size of the first one I attended years ago. I may put this one on every other year or so…
That’s not to say there wasn’t good stuff to see, I usually bring home way too many things from this show and this year was no exception. There was plenty of good stuff to see, and it was still well worth the trip.
I did notice that prices seem to have come back down again, after the exuberance of the first half of the year. They’ve come down a lot, to the point where I noticed a certain piece of equipment that would make a good economic indicator. More on that later!
Regardless, it was a lovely day for the show and I took a number of pictures of interesting things:
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There are a couple more shows this year before the season wraps up, including a new one in Pennsylvania that I’m going to check out. Stay tuned, and I’ll see you there!
- 2025
- Sep
- 3
A Workman Electronic Products N71-067 Power Supply - The Repair
After poking around in the power supply for a little while, I believed that the LM723 was probably bad. However, something didn’t set right. A few more checks and there it was - while the output transistor was fine, the driver transistor area had a substantially lower resistance than the surrounding parts would suggest. I pulled it out, and for all intents and purposes it’s shorted C-E.
That’s an easy fix, it’s a S8050 transistor. I had to place an order for some other things, so I ordered a batch of transistors.
It was easy enough to install
However, since the LM723 probably was quite stressed from this failure, I decided to replace it as well. I just cut it out and pulled the pins from the solder pads, then removed the solder with wick. That 1970s phenolic board smell! It’s going to get socketed just in case. (Finding these in DIP is getting kind of difficult!)
Since the big filter was quite old, I replaced it as well. Here’s a shot of the completed and re-installed board:
And, it works!
So what all was replaced?
The S8050 driver transistor for the series pass regulator.
The LM723 Regulator IC
The main filter capacitor.
I did dial the output back a little to 12.8VDC, just because I want this on my bench for other things.
A relatively easy repair, but there’s not much in this thing to go wrong. Next up is starting the actual rebuild on the Heathkit AG-7, stay tuned!
Previous part of this series: https://wereboar.com … /[url]