While still about 4 months away, there’s no better time to get your ticket as you can get the early boar price of $26, mailed to you at no extra charge. This is good for all three days - May 15th, 16th and 17th.
Ticket prices increase March 1st, so there’s no time like the present to get one if you plan on attending. Get your ticket here: https://hamvention.org/purchase-tickets/
Used to be every technician had a set of them in their toolbox. They were a required purchase when I was a student in vocational electronics. My set generally vanished years ago, and Radio Shack quit selling them long before they became a piece of history.
Turns out you can still get that exact same set. It’s not in the ratshackpack, but you take what you can get.
So I guess I’ll be over here playing with my diddlestick.
I’m (more or less) done re-doing images here. I did find a couple that I messed up and missed, and a few that were deleted before I realized what I did (use that trash can!) but everything should be back in place. Thankfully, the Internet Archive had that all stored…feel free to submit pages there if you want!
What did I do?
1: Cropped a lot of images to show the relevant parts only. You don’t need to see a photo with 1/3 of it being the dirty mat on my desk.
2: Resized a lot of images so they are faster loading - a 2000×2000 image of a single resistor isn’t useful, and just wastes your time.
3: Moved a lot of things around on the back-end. I had images everywhere, but created folders for various projects and moved general images into appropriate folders.
4: Renamed most of the images so you know what they are if you download and store, and then come across the image some time later. The only things that didn’t get completely renamed were event photos since there’s a lot of those. They’re in their own folders, and that may be a project of it’s own.
Anything else?
There are a few document links still pointing towards my old OX drive. Those documents are still there for now, but you can find everything at the Wereboar Documents Library here: https://wereboar.com … r=wereboar-documents
I’m going to set a search on those old links and replace them as I find them, or simply point to the docs library in general.
edit: As best I can tell, all links to OX drive have been removed. I’ll leave the files there for a while, but probably will remove them no later than July of this year in case someone wants to grab them from an old link.
That all?
Yep, everything should be back in place, the pages should look better, and you should get image downloads a lot quicker. There may be some short delays as new thumbnails are generated for you, but I tried to take care of all those beforehand during preview setup.
As always, if you find anything broken, please hit the mastodon link at the bottom of each page and let me know. Thank you for visiting, and I hope you’ve found something of interest here.
When I started this blog, I didn’t quite understand the way the image function of flatpress worked - I’ve made several changes over the years but none of them were really satisfactory to me, or even standardized.
I’ve decided to start at the beginning and clean up images, resizing loose images (those not in a gallery) to more standard sizes, adjusting them so they aren’t all over the place in the posts, and generally providing a cleaner look. I’ll crop junk off of them so you just get the part that’s important, instead of a tiny part in a big image. I’m also moving images to more useful locations within the site, collecting posts together so they’re not in random folders.
This is going to be a long project, but older posts should start to look better for you - and perhaps even load just a tad quicker since they won’t be megabytes long. There may be some broken things while I move folders and optimize images, but they should resolve quickly.
So…in honor of the old web - here’s an under construction gif.
Project Status
2021 - Nothing to do.
2022 - Completed January 8th 2026.
2023 - Completed January 9th 2026.
2024 - Completed January 14th 2026.
2025 - Completed January 15th 2026.
2026 - Already using the new format.
Cleanup - Completed January 15th 2026.
QA - Completed January 15th 2026.
Cleanup will involve removing old folders and other leftovers, and QA will consist of going through the entire blog, making sure links all work, and correcting any document/image links that are not using the new format. It’s going a little quicker than I expected, I have some downtime and have been hitting it hard. Stay tuned for some more equipment posts, coming shortly.
In-between cleanup and QA, things may break. I’ll fix them as I see them.
January 15th 2026 - I think we’re done…if you see anything broken, please let me know on mastodon.
Galleries for late 2025 may break, but I’m trying to avoid doing that. If you hit a post and there’s nothing there but a “directory doesn’t exist” message, try again in a day or so - I should have everything image pointing to it’s proper location by the end of the week.I think I have these fixed.
I hope that 2025 was good to you, and I hope you found something here on projects that caught your interest. I have a number of devices lined up for the coming months, and there’s plenty of hamfests on the way.
This will be near to the last post of the year here on projects, and it’s something to browse while you’re waiting for the new year holiday to start. I found out earlier this year that you can reference galleries from different points within this blogging system, and thought it would be cool to have a year-end page with all of the stuff I saw at hamfests. So…here it is! The only ones that won’t be presented in that manner is the SCARF show in May and the Central PA hamfest - both of those because there were very few pictures. They’ll be links instead.
Without further ado, here is the stuff I saw this year at hamfests:
.
The Sunday Creek ARF Hamfest, Shade Ohio.
A bunch of old-school test equipment.
That 1970s blue.
Still a lot of AM CB stuff.
A big, old, Heathkit power supply.
How big can you make a 5W CB?
I didn't buy a voltmeter this time!
.
The Cuyahoga Falls ARC Hamfest, Cuyahoga Falls Ohio.
A nice AOR scanner with a serial control port.
A table full of audio related stuff.
BetaMax anyone?
A giant broadcast tube.
A small capacitor checker. This went home with me.
Some cool 1970s cases. I took a woodgrain special home.
Someone had a collection of early music video.
A lot of radios and tubes.
The club has a table of cheap stuff.
A coffin set. These have become cheap.
The inside of the coffin set.
Another coffin set.
Another coffin set. Would have got this if I had room.
I bet this thing can't hear WLW next to the tower.
A giant-size signal generator.
Some radios and one of those monitor scopes.
Self explanatory.
Some old Heath stuff. Some of it's not all that useful these days.
Another small Heath scope. Took this one home, it's in great shape.
Dad's homebrew projects.
Knobs. Need I say more?
I wonder who Lafayette was channeling here?
The last Heathkit of it's type.
Who didn't have one of these?
A stack of old meters.
An old mill controller.
How many of these were made?
A nice National radio.
Pulse generators.
Various rackmount equipment.
Surprise, radios!
Even more radios.
You guessed it, radios!
You'd think this was a radio show.
An “Electric Eye” science kit.
A nice old Solar cap checker with a meter instead of an eye.
I couldn't pass this up for $5.
I see you hiding in there.
A lot of different equipment.
Just some stuff. There was a calibrator here I took with me.
I wanted the triple stack, but we couldn't come to a bargain.
A television test jig and degaussing coil.
Some oddball one-off set made in the 1970s in the USA.
I love that they used a lot of color on these.
.
The TUSCO Hamfest, New Philadelphia Ohio.
Some interesting equipment. Radio gear?
Lots of vidicon tubes. Lots and lots and lots!
The early 80s still live among us.
A dual band (lol!) Lafayette Radio.
I bet you never thought you'd see more radios.
AM/FM/8-Track with a cool honeycomb face.
Radio Shack ghosts haunt us.
A couple of old Tek (tube-type) scopes. Ok price.
A mini scope. That seems high priced.
Just stuff from the CFARC guys. I took the decade box.
.
The Athens County ARA Hamfest, Athens Ohio.
CD-R…once a miracle, now just junque.
The camera doesn't do the chrome justice.
An interesting passthrough counter.
A desoldering iron from the tube socket era.
An all-in-one RF test station.
Some older test gear including a cap checker in the box.
An HP 200 series generator and an old tape player.
A “Portable” multimeter.
Once of those tube unit power supplies.
An old Sony reel-to-reel tape player.
A couple of scopes. Interesting, but not needed.
An interesting Sencore tube tester.
Radios and an overpriced PACO tube tester.
A bad shot of some old gear. Would have taken the rightmost one if it had been in better shape.
One of Trio's active panel meters.
One of Heathkit's interesting lunchbox tube testers.
Some radio tuning gear.
.
The Dayton Hamvention, Xenia Ohio.
Friday:
I used to work for this toxic company.
Some big rackmount amps.
Somoe old Motorola comm analyzers.
A cool looking antenna controller.
A stack of audio gear.
A cool old blue B&H oscilloscope.
Lots of parts.
Stuff is just laid out on whatever.
It's chrome plated!
Lots of walkies.
A table full of consumer era radios.
One of those high-precision Regency counters.
Someone bought a box of CRTs and related materials.
A nice Heathkit decade box. Took this home.
A dirty Hallicrafters.
Not going to break this one.
Hard to believe it's only 1.7GB.
A giant dummy load. Dummy not included.
A nice Eico harmonic distortion analyzer. Went home as a project piece.
The accompanying Eico RF generator.
An Eico scope. Tempting, but I have too many scopes.
I’ve been posting blog links to a federated social network called Nostr. This was mostly to drive traffic here, but I’d reply to anything that was sent to me that was not obvious spam. I’ve written about that in a couple of past posts:
One of the reasons I chose the site I did was because it supported a feature of Nostr called “communities” - that’s exactly what it sounds like. A basic forum with a title and a common theme. I created /oldtech, a place for stuff like what I talk about here. While I never really got any other posts in the community, I did collect the usual spam.
Spam is a big problem on the Nostr network communities. There’s no good way to manage it, and the more popular you are the more you’ll get the standard Indian scams, crypto crap, and just general-purpose canned ham. You either approve it to show in the community, or you ignore it and it sits there in your inbox forever, waiting for you to approve it. In that regard, spam is very hard to control on Nostr, and it makes the communities messy.
Today I tried to make my usual Monday morning post and found that the site owner had removed communities in favor of a single feed of posts. The reason was that communities were “messy.” I fully understand this reasoning as there’s zero garbage control. Some of the communities I looked at had hundreds of pending spam messages in their box. (You can see pending messages, they just don’t show up in the regular feed.)
With that, my adventure with Nostr has come to and end, at least for now. I’ll check back in later in hopes it develops a little more, or perhaps I’ll find a new site that still has communities. Until then, you can find me here on wereboar, or on my mastodon feed.
Stay tuned for more hamfests, projects, and just plain junk!
This was the first time I’d gone to this show, and - while small - it offered quite a bit of television focused vendors. The usual flea market tat that shows up at hamfests these days was absent, even though the show was free to set up and enter.
I did end up spending about $45 and taking home a few project items which may show up later, depending on what I have scheduled. Regardless, here are the photos I took. I don’t have much to say about them, so there’s no description, just enjoy the glory of old television.
etm25-tv1-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv10-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv11-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv12-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv2-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv3-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv4-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv5-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv6-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv7-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv8-wereboar.jpg
etm25-tv9-wereboar.jpg
.
We did a museum tour as well, and that is well worth the admission price. I highly recommend that if you’re in the area. We didn’t stick around for the auction, while there were a few lunchboxes I’d like to take home I already have examples of them and do not need more.
…even your reprint manuals are starting to fall apart. My reprinted copy of the RCA RC-19 tube manual has started to break apart, the glued binding giving way.
This book probably qualifies as an antique itself!
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?
