One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that you can really tell something about the economy by what turns up at hamfests and what the prices are.
During better times, more stuff shows up at higher prices, obviously. More vendors are travelling because they know they can sell stuff at shows for a good price. Things like the Hallicrafters S-38 series show up in volume and at high prices because they can sell them. Those of us that know about the stuff want to see it first, and if we can poke at it we’re often willing to give a bit more if it’s what we want. We also get the experience of talking to the vendor who might be the one that actually owned the unit and can tell us about it.
During leaner years, less shows up but it’s cheaper, and you get more sold online because they can usually get wider exposure and a price closer to what a show would have offered during good times. Things like the Hallicrafters S-38 series don’t show up (yes, those are a good indicator because there were so many of them made) or if they do they cost next to nothing.
2020-2024 was the lean times, but stuff was cheap and if you were willing to go to a lot of shows, you could get some good stuff for literally a few dollars. That’s where I picked up most of the equipment I’m working with now. In 2025, prices started to rise - but they fell back pretty quickly and it started to be more like the lean years.
These last shows? They’ve been miserable. Fewer vendors, less new stuff (I assume companies are less willing to travel to smaller shows because there’s no crowd) and there’s a lot more not worth the money asked items. The big piles of junk vendors don’t show up. The tube guys don’t show up. The size of the shows have been shrinking drastically. People with certain items are asking more than a new comparable device would cost you because they bought them during good years and need to recover money.
The biggest tell for me this last show that said the economy is really in the toilet and is just a thin coat of varnish over rot is the guys that buy up everything else before all the rest of us can get there. For example, there’s one guy that I see at a lot of shows. He goes around before general opening and will buy up a lot of cherry items for his own table. Maybe do a little cleanup to them, but often just sit them on the table at a higher price. This guy had nothing other than just some normal hamfest tat and maybe one piece of oddball stuff. I’ve never seen his table that thin…there’s simply no cherries on the crap sundae right now, even for the insiders. The fact that this guy that goes to every local show, buys up things beforehand, and then resells them had nothing - that’s probably the biggest red flag I’ve seen.
The markets may be good, but the people in the trenches are dead. You all knew that already, however…
If you hit wereboar.com yesterday (13th) then you’ll have noticed that the site was offline.
Turns out there was something happening at the data center that hosted it, apparently a fire knocked out some electricity which took down the chillers and then the hosts, subsequently, the site. It’s all back up and running now, but there may be some short outages as things are brought back up or tested. They’re still asking us to be patient while they do testing and re-launch.
In the meantime I’ll just put this fire over here with the other fire. Stay tuned for more good junk!
Pygg.xyz is where this blog started after being moved from blogger.com. It wasn’t a good look, unfortunately…anything xyz is pretty much automatically sus (non-scrofa, of course) and didn’t pass the smell test. That’s why you’re here on wereboar.com.
If you still have any pygg.xyz bookmarks, you can safely remove them. The registrar now owns the domain, and they’ll probably load it with ads like registrars do when it’s a parking page.
Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you find something of interest here.
Odysee is a YouTube-like that allows for videos and shorts, but offers content creators a bit more control over things. It will generally follow the YouTube feed, but there may be a short delay as things sync up.
I’ve added this for anyone who want to stay away from Google services. It’s located in the sidebar, or bookmark the link below.
A note on this: Odysee appears to be in some financial trouble. The founder left literally the day before this was posted, and he talked about having some monetary hurdles to overcome. It’s not really the platform - I like it, but as some commenters pointed out - it’s just a dumping ground for things already posted on YouTube, you’re not getting any creator interaction with videos.
I did notice that, and a lack of any participation. Watched a few videos on the platform last night. Years old, no views.
I’ll let that channel run as long as possible, but if it gets really janky or unusable because of bandwidth issues I’ll stop. If there’s one thing I don’t want to give you, it’s a video that has to buffer like it’s dialup.
I recently did an unboxing for a Radioddity GS-10B Pro. The included battery charger didn’t work, and a friend offered to help me open it up to see if we could figure out what was going on.
While those of us here in the states celebrate our country’s 250th birthday, Projects from the Bottom Drawer celebrates a much more humble acheivment - that of it’s 5th birthday.
On July 4th, 2021, I set up pygg.xyz as a way to move my personal dealings off of a very breached gmail address. It had recently been in the 2021 LinkedIn breach, something I still get fallout from 5 years later as mailers insist that I’m actually a business and do I need help with employees/receivables/publishing/etc.
At the same time, I decided to re-open this blog - it had been hosted on blogger.com. I quicky found that .xyz domains had little trust in the internet world and set out on a search for another porcine-related site. Wereboar.com had recently been released by it’s owner, so I made the purchase and here we are.
Pull up a chair, have a slice of cake, and thank you for joining me these past 5 years. I hope to present strange junk and weird projects for many more.
When I set the documents library up, I didn’t give enough thought to the naming conventions. Before I get deeper into things, it’s time to correct that. I’m making some small changes to where the docs library resides.
You’ll still be able to find the new docs library at https://wereboar.com/docs/ - the same as before, but there are now two folders: public and protected.
Public is just that. Documents I can share. Everything that used to be in wereboar-documents is now here, and you can simply edit your URL to go to the new link. Protected is documents of interest to what I’m working on, but can’t share for whatever reason - primarily copyright. These are password protected but will be moved into public if the situation allows.
If you happen to find anything broken, please let me know. I’m going to do a couple rounds of searching to make sure I have everything cleaned up, but this will take a few days.
Here’s a piece of relatively useless but interesting information - at the time I wrote this line, there has been 805,545 view on this blog. The most popular post is the 2025 Hamfest list: https://wereboar.com … mfest-and-show-list/.
I’ve added some new documents to the library, and I’m going to try and create a new zip every quarter (or so.)
This archive contains all of the documents I’ve collected for projects - at least ones that I can share. This is currently about 400MB, and is a zipped archive of zipped files of many different kinds.
Note the Drive link provides you a .7z file with a simple password: 123456 - this is to keep a certain website from complaining that oh no there’s words in that document I recognize and you can’t do that!
