The Findlay Radio Club 2023 Hamfest was just a bit muted this year - the skies threatened rain but none appeared, so there were quite a few vendors. This year, a lot of late-model Hallicrafters SW radios showed up, I assume because people who purchased them in the 1960s are finally letting them go for various reasons. Unfortunately, with nothing to listen to on shortwave except Radio Havana, these radios aren’t of much use other than as a curiosity. The proliferation of SDR boxes hasn’t helped, considering you can get a direct entry radio that sounds good and runs on a common LiIon prismatic cell for a bill.
There was plenty of good stuff to look at regardless, and some good things to take home. Here’s my memories of the show, some of which were of unique pieces where the photo ended up on other sites.
One of those shots was a relatively rare signal generator from a long-dead company, Measurements Corporation of Boonton, NJ. According to the site admins, this was the only in-the-flesh image they’ve seen. I was happy to contribute to the community’s knowledge base. Check that entry out here: https://www.radiomus … rd_generator_82.html
Now, on to the good stuff!
A lot of old car audio devices.
An old HP 1.8GHz SpecAn. Nice display, but the $100 cheapies do the same thing nowadays.
An old Motorola plug scanner antenna. Took it home, so old the plastic was stuck to the metal.
A box of Atari 800XL computers, a drive, modem and etc.
Carbon Comp resistors. Great for resistive fuses, some went home with me.
One of GM's oddball radios, and some misc goodies.
A Radiola 24, or as a friend said “It's a DIY Television!”
A dynamotor for a radio device. Yeah, that's 33A input current!
An electrostatic television and some radios.
Some old, but expensive (for it's time) equipment.
One of the many radios of this type that showed up this year.
The “just lay it on the ground” goodies vendor.
More ground goodies.
A meter that's dedicated to testing the particular items in a horizontal circuit.
A box of old Atari-style joysticks.
Meters. Meters everwhere!
This vendor had a wide range of military radios and accessories.
No reasonable offer is refused!
A neat old Velleman scope, but these like to blow their inputs. No power, no see, no buy.
A portable podium with amplifier. I remember these from high school.
A neat old radio with a just-as-old clock on top.
A random radio back down on a table of tubes.
My fellow show-goer checks out a record player.
A piece of gear designed for RTTY service.
An old DuMont scope and a unique signal generator.
Heathkit scopes and 80s radios.
More shortwave radios.
Lots of genuine switchcraft plugs.
This vendor was keeping the show grounds from blowing away.
Rain threatened but didn’t invade this year, so there was a decent number of vendors and some good stuff to see. Pictures from the show are coming soon, I’m processing them and hope to have them up next week.
I find myself bringing home less and less each year, as I’ve already accumulated as many boat anchors as I can handle, and I didn’t see the few I’d like to acquire at the show. I limited myself to some meters, some oddball parts, and a few collectible items that looked interesting. Nothing really special, just neat.
A couple of Weston meters, an antenna for a scanner, some carbon resistors, a weather radio clock, some wall warts that were 50 cents each, and a couple of old UK radio magazines. I’ll probably go back for more magazines, since that guy was local to my home area.
I usually don’t take any photos at this event, because it’s just a general flea market - but things of interest do show up there from time to time. While these items aren’t all related to electronics, I still found them interesting enough to snap a shot.
Someone found some a variety of late 1960s and early 1970s Skidoo snowmobiles and brought them for sale.
A “Mercedes Gazelle” built on a VW chassis. The Bug was a popular platform for modification and, at one point, you could make it look like just about anything you wanted.
A nice Sparton 667 radio. Everything was present, and the chassis looked unmodified and clean. It had what appeared to be a number of gel electrolytics, so hopefully whomever brought this home doesn’t just plug it in.
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I didn’t get the model of this Zenith console, but the chassis was similarly clean and unmodified. The record player had been removed, however, but that’s not a terrible loss - chances are the stylus was long dead and unobtanium.
The rest of the trip was just your standard flea-market stuff, and I ended up going home with a small album of 78s and a few tools.
Two events that always happen the week of Labor day are Johnstown (Ohio) Swapper’s, and the Findlay Hamfest.
Johnstown started out as a gun swap but turned into a general flea market. While not necessarily electronics related, you do tend to find some electronics related stuff there - typically more of a consumer nature.
Findlay, of course, is a hamfest that’s been going on since forever ago. It always has some good deals, even if it’s raining and not many vendors show up.
I doubt I’ll have any pictures from Johnstown, but there will be plenty from Findlay in the coming month or two.
Johnstown Swapper’s Day
https://jcscohio.org/swappers-day/
September 2-4 (Labor Day Weekend)
9A-6P Rain or Shine
Admission is $6, parking is free in surrounding fields.
Midway has multiple food vendors on site.
The show grounds are located on roads that are not meant to carry this much traffic, and will back up. Go early, if you’re not there when they open it may be difficult to get there. Last year it was so backed up some friends I know didn’t get in.
The Findlay Radio Club Hamfest
https://findlayradioclub.org/hamfest
September 10th, 2023
8A-1P Rain or Shine
Admission is $10, parking is free on site.
Usually 1-2 food vendors on site.
This is easy to get to, but good deals are early. Usually open a little before 8AM.
2015 was the second to last year that the Hamvention was in Dayton.
One of the things I’ve noticed after looking at pictures from the last 20 years, is how the stuff that shows up has changed. In the 90s (no pictures, sorry!) there was a lot of your typical radio gear, but also a lot of golden age computing equipment and a lot of junk PC parts. Boxes of CPUs, hard drives, boards, etc. Early 2000s, the golden age computing stuff vanished to be replaced by a lot of audio gear, CBs, things of that nature. Consumer radios and televisions from the 1950s were in high supply and not that high of demand. 10 years later, consumer electronics from the 50s, 60s, and somewhat of the 70s was plentiful, but fading. Finally, the last few years, all of that old plastic radio stuff from the middle of the 20th century seems to have dried up, to be replaced with gear from the 80s (what’s still working,) and a lot of test equipment from the 60s and 70s, and some from the 80s.
As always, there are plenty of the normal “things” you find at a show like this - old Hallicrafters gear, R390s, etc. - but there’s nothing to listen to so they don’t go as quickly. But they’re still there.
What surprised me about the last show was the lack of those little $100-150 DSP SDR radios that are all over the online shopping sites. Who knows why, maybe they just aren’t as popular with the amateur crowd.
Here’s the pictures I took of the 2015 show, you can see lots of 1950s-1960s radio gear, and some oddball things that have vanished from view these days. It was an excellent day, warm, sunny, and as always, filled with people tripping over the charmingly broken pavement at Hara - hoping the sewer lines didn’t explode again!
My camera here wasn’t the best, and had a lot of trouble with anything that wasn’t full sun. A few of the pictures are slightly blurry, so my apologies in advance.
An abandoned Sony portable television set.
The trip hazard aisles of the Hamvention.
A bunch of audio gear.
The crate was more interesting than the items!
That Bell&Howell Blue.
An ElectroVoice EJ1-X Horn.
An old-style rack cabinet at the Mendelson's tent.
A bunch of old Canon cameras.
CBs. This was right about the time they were no longer popular.
A nice Zenith Chairside style radio.
A bunch of parts in bins.
One of the more unusual radios I've seen show up at Dayton.
Just some equipment. I'd like the meter thing at the top right…
A big FLIR display inside the arena.
An old military generator. Well used.
No explanation needed.
Just stuff.
I think this is a keyboard computer?
A big fresnel lens. I think for a lighthouse…
A laser tube. Probably burn your eyes out.
Some sort of military terminal with plasma display.
A blurry shot of a big mixer.
I think this is a homebrew device. Nicely made.
Some old radios and television sets.
Lots of parts.
An old-school 3D printer.
An antique, even then.
Bins full of radio parts. I see a Pink GE in there!
Lots of wood and plastic radios.
Prosumer and commercial radio gear from times past.
We travel back in time for these radios.
The first time I'd seen one of these Tek clones.
No one is calling.
Lots of Bearcat scanners.
A bunch of scopes and other stuff.
Solar panels.
Stability Computers and other things.
Cases. Lots of them.
Supposedly an M1 Abrahms part…
A wind turbine.
A Collins transmitter, inside the box.
A beautiful old Collins transmitter.
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This is a panoramic shot of one of the booths. I believe this guy had a bunch of equipment from the Western Electric North Carolina Works, but I can’t be sure. Some of that stuff tends to all run together.
Finally, the stuff I brought home. A CountyCom radio that was purchased from a dealer that was local to me(!), a book on 555s, some solder, LEDS, tape, and an Atari 2600 joystick. The radio was probably the most expensive item out of all of the stuff, and I still have it sitting on my desk at home. (Pay no attention to the biscuit mix in the background, that didn’t come from Dayton!)
While I do kind of miss the old venue, it’s time had come and gone, in part due to the owner’s neglect. It just seemed to attract a slightly different kind of vendor - Mendelson’s didn’t attend the Xenia show for the few years they had left, and some of the big “stuff on racks” vendors vanished. I’m not going to cry for the latter, however, those guys were a lot more expensive than they should have been, and I’m guessing companies like Rigol put them out of business.
Regardless, things change, and the new venue certainly has better food!
The next show is the Findlay Radio Club event at the Hancock County Fairgrounds in Findlay (of course!) This is always a good show assuming it doesn’t rain. Good stuff shows up without the prices you see at the bigger shows. Stay tuned for those pictures, as well as some from Fort Wayne if I can drag myself up there in November. I also have a few pieces of equipment on the bench, and will be talking about those as soon as I can.
More digging around in archives revealed a bunch of pictures from the 2015 show in Findlay. I can’t remember if this was the first or second year I went to this show, but it was quite large, and had a lot of things to see and buy, if you were so inclined. The weather was superb, a bright, sunny day.
While I didn’t have the best of cameras at the time, I still took a few good (and some blurry) shots of equipment and items at the show. This one was definitely worth the trip, and we stuck around until the show ended and vendors were packing up.
Next up is some photos from Dayton of the same year.
A blurry shot of what appears to be a KIM microcomputer trainer clone.
Lots of capacitance for all your electron storage needs.
A coffin radio. Not sure what was being demonstrated there…
Lots of radio gear, of course.
Lots of old-school computing power.
Parts. Lots and lots of parts.
A ever popular Predicta, predictably full of bad components!
2016 was the last year for the Hamvention at Hara Arena, which was falling into serious disrepair. (It closed later that year.) To be fair, I don’t know how you could tell - the first time I went in the mid 90s it looked like it should have been condemned. Fortunately, I wasn’t there when the sewer lines burst…
I’m not sure why I took these two images, save one was a machine you don’t see in the wild very often. The other was probably because I knew someone that wanted said item, and it was a “Hey, you want this?” message. Regardless, here they are - my last little bit of the Hamvention at Hara.
Actual silicon solar panels. That was a pretty reasonable price for the time.
An IMSAI 8080 in all it’s glory. You just don’t see many of these in the wild.
Other than the rather generic telephone relay rack I brought home and took a picture of (complete with nutty friend comparing heights,) that’s it. I thought I took more than this, but I guess not!
I really tried to be good this year and not drag home much. Some parts and things still made it into my car, however - I guess I just didn’t lock the doors or something.
But, I did limit myself to something I’ve been looking for (An AA5 radio and a tube tester,) some books, and a handful of parts. The only real impulse buy was the Simpson Meter - how can you pass up that awesome Bell System aqua and yellow? While it’s not of much use these days, requiring oddball 15V batteries, it’s still an interesting piece and will go on display with my other Bell System artifacts.
I wanted to bring home the big coffin radio that was at the show, but there’s simply no room for that. Some other test equipment caught my eye as well, but again - no room or need. I don’t need a 200W meter sitting in the rack drawing more current than the rest of the equipment!
Everything that I could test works well, and I kept spending to a minimum. I guess that leaves more money for later shows(?) We’ll see what Findlay brings…
A 1970s Simpson meter made for Ma Bell. Even has a KS number on the face!
An AA5 radio. The color is rather bleah, but the radio itself works well.
Some 1970s vintage radio books full of old radio manufacturer ads.
Everything you wanted to know about radio-electronics, and a cool little GE planner with more useful data.
Hey, they were free. Fart smells for everyone.
Some oddball switches. These and the GE planner were part of a package deal for a few bucks.
A not-too-bad condition tube tester for a really good price. Nowhere near the $300 others ask for these cheapies.
Some mini banana jumpers and a who-knows-what device for a buck.
No rain threatened this year’s show, and there were a lot of vendors out - including some with a good deal of test equipment and other items. Lots of goodies, and everyone seemed willing to be negotiable on prices. My fellow show-goer and I spend the morning wandering around before heading over to the greasy spoon next door for some late breakfast grub and coffee.
I tried not to bring home much, but some stuff still wandered into my car. There are a few pieces I would have like to brought home, but space didn’t allow me to do so and they sadly had to remain where they were.
Here are my pictures of the event, and I’ll be posting my haul shortly.
Next show is the Findlay show, which always has some good stuff (assuming no rain!)
See you there!
A radio with a big CD sticker.
An S38 radio. This decided not to come home with me.
A homebrew antenna.
A Simpson meter made for Ma Bell.
Someone's collection of radio books.
A big coffin radio, complete with tubes and manual.
A radio selector dial. Friend says probably from Youngstown due to WKBN being there.
A high voltage power supply n stuff.
Just some stuff. One of the books went home with me.
Some random meters and radios.
Some military and commercial radio gear.
A big collection of bananna slicers.
Part of the fun is digging through the parts.
A friend took this HV probe home for work with TWT devices.
Some radio gear.
A big vibrating reed frequency meter.
Free rotten egg smells for everyone!
A neat 1960s sencore tube tester with pre-cheap transistor checker.
A nice old Simpson meter, but needs those weird batteries.
Some NOS and used Moto comm speakers.
Just stuff.
Some weird switches and other parts.
A tape recorder. Fellow show-goer almost took it home.
A nice PACO tube tester. Took this home for $40.
Some AA5 and transistor radios. One came home with me.
A giant 18GHz Weinschel oscillator from the 1980s.
I was digging through some old storage recently, and came across this set of pictures from Dayton 2003.
I went with a group of friends this year, and of course it was just pouring down rain. Much of the flea market was covered and uncovered at various times, so we spent most of our time inside the arena and ballrooms, looking at the stuff. While we did view the entire flea market, I didn’t get the camera out as much as I wanted to because of the random hard rain showers.
Keep in mind that these were taken before all the fancy things like good auto white balance and low light compensation, the quality of the shots is all over the place. It was hard to stop and take pictures at times due to the crowds.
Regardless, we had a good time, and here’s my memories of the event.
An old (now ancient) AB controller computer.
Lots of antique CPUs.
An interesting looking RF amplifer chassis.
An IFR analyzer. I worked for their parent company at the time.
I think these are switching boxes.
A cheapie antenna.
More Antenna Needed.
Antennas made from PVC.
Baluns in PVC.
Even more antennas. Detecting a theme here?
You guessed it.
Another PCB antenna.
An antenna tuner.
AOR's display for 2003.
The main arena at HARA.
Random arena shot.
Another random arena shot.
Batteries dot jaypeg
More batteries for your (now) old tech.
A big transmitter tube.
Switches and tuners.
An interesting device.
Yep, it's stuff in a box.
Copper coils n things.
A box with a display!
More coils.
Baluns.
A communications bridge in a case.
An “Ion Cannon.”
A pringles cantenna. Love the label here.
Forbidden canned foods.
Remember when these were all the rage?
I prefer my sound to stay put.
Computer cards from long ago.
I think I took this picture due to the weather radio ad.
That's a big choke. And it's smooooooooth.
Another blast from the past.
These things used to be expensive.
A big (wet) coil.
Custom coils.
Remember when this stuff was cheap?
More copper.
Discharge tubes.
I have no idea what was going on here.
Yeah, uh huh.
Early SDR, I believe.
This stuff was usually overpriced.
Lots of test equipment.
More equipment.
Obsolete equipment.
Tunable notch filters.
Dude looks worried.
Bandpass filters.
Top view of the bandpass filters.
Geiger counter tubes.
Heatsinks, probably from 486 CPUs.
A repeater.
I don't think she's impressed.
I don't know you well enough to answer that.
ICOM gear.
More ICOM gear.
More ICOM gear.
More ICOM gear.
More ICOM gear.
iconicpw1.jpg
Wet junk in the flea market.
Keys.
A big key.
Lamps made from transmitter tubes.
Some meters.
Meters in the back of a van.
Analog television.
A blurry shot of a mic.
Some odds n ends for the radio trade.
Microphones for your rig.
More lamps from tubes.
motoma.jpg
Whatever this thing does, it's lit up.
A neon dragon. What more do you need?
An old Vibroplex Key.
An AMPS phone. Probably still had service in '03.
I'm happy stuff like this is long gone.
Parts is parts.
A telephone patch panel.
The electronic porcupine in it's native habitat.
Don't you love auto white-balance? We didn't have it then.
The Palm Pilot sells me.
An R390. These things will never go away.
Some Hallicrafters gear.
A blurry shot of some radio gear.
Before switching power supplies we did it with motors.
Rotate and Enhance!
Old DBS.
A little scope on a big cart.
Old school specans.
These things used to cost a fortune.
I'm not saying it looks like that, but it does.
A screenshot of a screen.
A stack of gear.
Wires n stuff.
More stuff.
Surplus Sales of Nebraska.
Did I mention stuff?
How about some stuff?
Clocks.
Switches. Stuff like this was usually locked down.
