This show takes place monthly at the Ohio Expo Center (State Fairgrounds) and runs from November to April. There’s generally not a lot of electrical goods here, but this time I was surprised. A lot of radios and other technology related goodies showed up. I suspect this is in part due to the show being the first one of the season, and being close to the holidays - everyone is looking for that perfect gift.
While not all of the pictures I took were of electrical things, I found the stuff to be interesting (or strange!) enough to take a picture of. I’ll probably hit next month’s show as well, so stay tuned!
The American Locomotive Works lineup in picutures.
A “Bandmaster Senior” transmitter with VFO.
A Ma Bell special.
The Columbus (Ohio) buggy works.
Ooooooo cooties! Giant ones, no less!
Honey in various gag gift bottles.
A “Dictograph.” Looks like a multi-station shop phone.
A big wooden dragon.
When snack makers go bad.
A nice Motorola Electrostatic Television. Don't plug that in!
Apparently meant for export to the USSR.
Better call Batman!
A “Chinese” radio from the United Lan-Sing company.
A light for home film, each bulb is 375W!
A collection of vintage telephones.
Cylinder players.
A couple more cylinder players.
A nicely restored Edison Home with a rude yet historically important cylinder.
A “victrola” type record player.
A Clarion receiver.
A couple of random radios.
Listen to the worn out clocks go clunkclunkclunkclunk.
A radio with a Bulova clock.
Car radios from who knows where.
A Philco “Mystery” wireless remote.
A Rheem Reel-to-Reel player.
Cool, but ultimately useless analog television.
A TI 99/4A still in the box. Was abandonware when new!
This year’s show seemed to be a bit smaller than normal, but it may have been just my imagination. Regardless, there was a lot to see and the show was, as usual, busy. I tried to limit what I brought home to things that were on my want list, and I mostly did so - only diverging for a book that looked interesting. I’ve written about one of the pieces, a meter from Heathkit, so check out the posts just previous to this one for a look at that piece.
A stack of audio gear.
A nice, unmodified BC-314 radio.
A Betamax player under some audio gear.
A Craig 408 mini reel recorder.
The inside of the Craig 408.
A dual well cassette deck that went home with a friend.
A stack of 1970s CB gear. Love the big lamps on these.
Two vintages of HP frequency counters.
Rockbound Radio.
A DeVry oscilloscope.
A big agricultural drone.
A Rat Shack DX-150B radio. It went home with me for $50.
A neat Hickok 900C VTVM.
A 70s-ish? Heathkit Sig Gen.
When you need to hear it, here it is.
A cool old HP scope with 70s color buttons.
An HP 4000 VTVM with a dB scale.
A couple of meters. The IM-1212 (blue) went home with me.
A couple of old-school meters. The 260 went home with a friend.
A rather unusual Phase-Angle meter for 3-phase systems.
Calling MAin-2 2222!
Radios from a GM car - could be removed and played on AA batteries!
Random Radios.
A selection of radios, testers, and speakers.
A neat direction finding radio.
A Hallicrafters rig and other things.
More random radios and a turntable.
Radios and meters. The meter was cool but required odd batteries.
Radios and speakers.
A RCA VTVM, pre-VIZ.
Random reel-to-reel player.
A rather unusual “Sailor” radio.
Random solar cell. Always find one of these at a show.
A couple of Sony reel tape players.
A stack of miscellaneous gear.
A microcontroller test platform in the shape of a game device.
Books n things.
Just stuff
Random test equipment.
Random things.
Televisions and radios and just stuff.
Random meters and a Superradio III.
More things from the table above.
A NIXIE meter right in the middle.
Parts is Parts.
Another Simpson meter and parts.
A Televideo terminal made to look like a DEC VT100.
A Shango Special.
Power adapter, anyone?
A piece of equipment made by a (probably) now silent key.
I was quite surprised, there were a lot of electrical and other related technology items for sale at the show. While none of them really wanted to go home with me, they were fun to look at and talk about with the vendors. I’ll probably head out there for the December show as well, perhaps the holiday shopping season will bring the really odd stuff out of the woodwork.
I’m currently processing the pictures from the show, so stay tuned!
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!
