2023 Huntsville Hamfest from the view of a vendor this time!!!

Man time flies! It has already been a year since me and Trey had come over and bought all those military surplus cases and stuff! I cant understand how that has happened…

Anyway, I signed up for a table in the “bone yard” which is indoors at Huntsville, which is nice since it means it is out of the direct sun in August and has air conditioning. Well Trey arrives the day of the event and I already have my stuff int he truck, we just load a couple things he is bringing and we are off.

Side notes: Check out the vintage Ten Tec t-shirt I only get out for this and sometimes Field Day, I am probably the only person alive who still has one. I am also monitoring two ham bands here, our 2 meter simplex frequency and our 1.25 meter simplex frequency, We used both over the course of the day to make contact with friends. Back to the story already in progress…

We get to the convention center right on time and find a huge line of cars waiting to get into the show area. Once we work our way through the line we figure out these people are parking in the underground parking lot and we need to go to the back to unload the truck, well we get out of line, unload the truck and setup in short order. I can tell already it is going to be a good show for me when I can’t even get the truck parked before Trey (who went with the stuff to the table) is already being pummeled by dealers wanting to buy my stuff! This is a good sign!

By the time this photo was taken, the Icom IC 705 and tuner were sold. It literally lasted 5 minutes. this is good as the proceeds from the sale of this radio went to purchase the sBitx radio that I want for POTA instead. I had also already sold one of the two power supplies I took over as well. Common items seem to have went really fast to be honest.

Here, Trey (KG4WBI) Is getting settled in for the long arduous day of minding the table. Also, at this point I still had the Elecraft K1 pictured here as well. More on this radio later.

Once the doors opened, it was a free for all till about lunch time. It was REALLY crowded with so many people that it was hard to imagine the total number of participants. Everybody seemed to have a radio, even the little kids!

Things moved off of the table steadily all morning though and I had high hopes that I would actually achieve my goal of not taking any of it home with me! Each little item, one by one, would get picked up and bought by some enterprising person looking for the find of the day. I was happy to help them too.

After lunch I made my way over to the POTA table and grabbed a photo for the blog, they were pretty busy so I didn’t bother them with my shenanigans but left them to inform the youth about the wonders of ham radio. While out on my stroll I did check on a couple of items I was looking for and stopped to play with the N3ZN keys for a minute as they are SWEEEEET! Then it was back to the grind of tending “shop”…

I continued to see the stuff I didn’t use goto new homes one at a time till I was down to the K1, the Ten Tec 238 tuner and the Comet Antenna Analyzer. Then the strangest thing happened. I had to goto the bathroom. Well, that wasnt really all that odd, but what was happening at the table was. Turns out Josh from Ham Radio Crash Course had sent out scouts looking for a K1 or a K2 and they found mine and told him. He was livestreaming the event too! Well, he finds the table and makes his way over to it to find Trey minding the booth in my absence. You can actually watch his stream and see the whole thing transpire, just fast forward to about the 18 minute mark to see where it all starts.

Ham Radio Crash Course Video

A little back story here. I love the little K1, it was a favorite of mine for many years and I have used it off and on for that time. I just took a long hard look at the gear in the shack and realized the K1 sits on a shelf WAY more than not and I needed it to goto a good home where it would see more air time. So with a little sadness, I packed it up to goto the hamfest to find a new home. I get attached to things like this way to much and this is an exercise in decluttering my life, I wanted to move out a ton of gear and not just throw it away or such but turn it into something I would use instead. The K1 is just a plain fun radio to use, hence the pain in seeing it leave. I believe Josh will do a wonderful job at this and look forward to seeing the little K1 on his youtube channel soon.

It was great interacting with him and getting to chat for a minute, he took it straight way over to the test bench and had them check it for operation and he was happy it worked as advertised, All of this is also in the livestream…lol.

Then I had one more trek around a little to pick up a few items I have been looking for and actually found. I got a coax and some connectors from the Wire Man, I got the drop-in desk charger for my old Icom HT I have been using lately and it even came with a working radio! So now I have two!!! HAHA, why did I come to the hamfest again??? Then I bought a cable from another cable builder, ABR Industries, and I must say they look really good, I wanted a new coax for my POTA work and he builds his with common mode chokes built into the cable, that is really nice and i am looking forward to testing this cable on the nanoVNA to see how it compares to my homebrew chokes I made.

Then the finale of the day came when I went back over to N3ZN’s booth and talked to him about a small POTA key. The next thing I know, I bought one!

This key is tiny, at about 1.5” by 1.5”, it will be an awesome POTA key. I am going to look into how I plan to use it and expect there to be blog posts coming soon about it. I also got to talk to the man himself while he filed out my ticket on it and he is an amazing guy, I count it as a blessing to have met him. Hopefully we will cross paths again soon. If I get the chance I want to share with him my keys I built back in the day, we talked for a while and he is one of the few people that can actually appreciate the work that went into making them.

In closing I wanted to share a photo of my current dream rig, the Elecraft K4 with or without the amplifier, I just want the radio to be honest. At some point I will upgrade from the aging Ten Tec radios in my shack and this is probably what will replace them. I love everything about this radio and quietly take a peek at it when I am at the hamfest, but for now, there is POTA to do and contacts to make with the gear I have!

PS: All I brought home was the antenna analyzer and the Ten Tec tuner, both of which I dont mind holding on to for a while longer…

73

WK4DS-David

Dalton Hamfest 2023 for a Ten Tec radio junkie…

Well, it is that time of year again. The Dalton Hamfest is one of our bigger local events and this year did not disappoint. Below is a Omni 6+ with matching speaker power supply (radio in the bottom of the stack) just like the one I use in my ham shack at home. This particular radio was found outside in the boneyard of all places. This is a wonderful radio that would work really well for anyone wanting to get on HF. It is especially good for CW, the receiver is just buttery smooth and wonderfully sensitive…I could go on about this radio for a long time, but suffice it to say, if your into CW and vintage radios, this one is hard to beat. It was basically the pinnacle of CW rigs in my opinion.

Aside from the usual vendors where you can get any number of new radios, antennas or other widgets associated with Amateur Radio, it has become something of a quest for me and Trey (KG4WBI) to find all of the Ten Tec gear we can find and photo document it without buying it! LOL we ALMOST came home with that Triton…(just take a gander at it below) it was in great condition and worked beautifully…

This year netted a incredible pile of photos that really impressed me when I started looking back through them. You see, while you’re walking around, you don’t notice that you have seen so many pieces of equipment until you start looking at the photos you’ve captured of them.

A prime example of this is the fact that we found two of the same kind of antenna tuner. Yet one looks like it was in a smokers ham shack and the other was not. I am pretty sure this is actually the case too as I have never known Ten Tec to do a run of gold trimmed radios or accessories.

Something that I did notice was the wide variety of Ten Tec radios that we’re at the hamfest this time, everything ranging from an old Triton and Argosy (pictured above with the matching power supply) all the way up to an Omni 7! By the way, that Omni 7 also has 6 meters… 😂 Once I added the Collins filters to my Omni 7 it is one of my favorite radios of all time. It works surprisingly well with just the stock filter but the selectivity just gets unreal with the additional 500hz and 300hz mechanical filters made by Collins.

One particular radio of interest that I have always been intrigued by, but have never really thought about buying is the Ten Tec Scout. This radio is unique in that it is a small, portable radio with a fairly powerful transmitter. I think it is 50 watts of transmitter power and to change bands, you replace the cartridge on the front of the radio with a different band module. This allows the radio to remain fairly small and still cover all the HF bands. This is a really forward thinking idea and Ten Tec is renowned for this. The Jupiter radio is a perfect example of their forward thinking, it laid the ground work for the whole Flex line of radios.

To have a whole set of these band modules is fairly hard to do and this gentleman, at the ham fest, had all of them except for one. He was missing the 30 meter module only from what I could see. This was a really impressive kit that he had and it was also in a nice pelican case and the price was really reasonable. This would make for a really awesome POTA rig or even a field day rig.

I guess it just proves that there is more out there available than you think when you just start adding it all up. Since I was just casually snapping cell phone photos as we walked around the ham first, I never really look at the camera roll until we were leaving, and that is when I realise we had seen so many different radios by just this one manufacturer, who is actually out of business at this point. There were even more radios from the typical Icom, Yeasu and Kenwood factions that were everywhere. There was plenty of equipment to choose from is my point.

It was nice to see that someone could still most likely find an obscure, vintage radio that they had been looking for, pretty easily, and to be honest there was a ton of Drake, Hammarlund and Collins radios as well. (That Drake TR7 really had me… I love the color scheme they chose especially well)

I have to give an honorable mention to another radio that is near to me that I have yet to own, and that is the Elecraft K2. There was a 10 watt version of this radio also for sale that day, and I was very VERY tempted to take it home with me…

But explaining to Teresa, why I brought another radio home was not something that I was looking forward to doing, so I left it sitting on the table and maybe cried a little…dont tell anyone… haha.

All was not lost though, as we did bring a radio home between the two of us. It turned out that Trey acquired a 2m Ten Tec HT that has been made out of pure hens teeth. He is actually working towards getting it operational again. He put it on a bench power supply and it did power up but it needs a few little things repaired on it. Currently it does not have a battery but he is looking for a battery to rebuild to put back on it. So if you know of someone that has a battery, even if it is trashed, please let me know as we can rebuild it, as long as it is complete.

Going to a hamfest for me, is more about community than equipment these days. I did grab a few ham stick antennas for my QRP radios when I do POTA activations, but other than that I did not get anything substantial at all. What I did most of the time instead was chat with friends, (whom all I had seen the night before at the club meeting LOL) and made a few more while at the tables talking about the really cool radios we found.

All in all, we had a great time today and if you have never been to a ham fest, I recommend you go to one just to see the spectacle of it. The bigger the better. Until next time, get your radio out!!!

72

de WK4DS

Why do I want to buy so many ham radios???

I find myself wanting every radio I see and with a short look through the bios of some ham operators on QRZ.com I am not alone in this.

What is it with this obsession wiht collecting radio gear that us hams must endure? I mean they literally all do the exact same thing…all of them. Yet we want multiples of these radios anyway.

Now, I understand having a base rig that stays at home and can be integrated into several things and it is not simple to break down for portable operations, and also having a radio that can do specific jobs like SOTA or POTA or ARRL Field Day.

This makes sense but why do we want to have two base rigs or three or five or 10 as well as three or four portable radios for POTA as well as mobile radios stacked to the ceiling and we can only use one at a time. LOL.

You see, I am that guy. I have a base station that has two complete radios in it that share an antenna and I also have FOUR, yes FOUR, POTA rigs currently! Four, really? A TenTec Argonaut 5, an ICOM IC-705, an Elecraft K1, and a Penntek TR-35 and I love them all… I just don’t understand the human brain sometimes, why do I want so many radios? I realized this yesterday when the Penntek TR-45L was launched, I REALLY like this new radio and found myself wanting one really bad, but then I stopped and let reason talk to me for a minute and realized that my current radios ALL DO THE EXACT SAME THING!!! To add to the problem, one of the radios is the Penntek TR-35 for crying out loud!!!! LOL!!! Compound that with the fact that I have yet to use it for a field activation and my wanting the new radio is just lunacy… So how do I combat this? Well, the first thing is to get out these radios and take a long hard look at them and decide if I really want to own these radios or the new one. I personally have also set a limit on the quantity of radios I will own as well…apparently there is an exemption for POTA rigs…but I digress. Another thing I have implemented as of late is a rule of balance. This is where I have to remove something if I want to add something. By doing this I keep the stack a little more reasonable and I can recoup some of the money needed for the new radio from the sale of the old one I am letting go to make room.

The POTA rigs are starting to pile up!

Some will say it is because each radio has a feel to it and some radios have character to them and to this I say they are right! I also understand that once you find the radio that you like the most, keep it and the second most favorite as well and then get rid of the rest of them! LOL. Are they really bringing you joy just sitting either on a shelf or worse…in a box under the bed!!!

You see having multiple radios like me doesn’t benefit the amateur operator in any way other than collecting. If you enjoy collecting radios then by all means, buy as many as you want, but remember if you are not collecting radios then what is the point of buying so many? Of course this is my opinion and this is not a rule in any way, shape, or form, but I do have reason in the thought process. What else could we buy with the money we spent on all of these radios had we not bought them?

I also dabble in the hobby of photography and that hobby is no different from Amateur Radio in that the most appealing or “sexy “part of the system is the central piece which is the radio here and in photography it is the camera body. These are universally wanted by the users of each hobby respectively. Photographers will have gear acquisition syndrome (G.A.S.) and make joking videos about it on YouTube because it is such a problem. It is a real thing as companies spend dumptruck loads of money on targeted marketing to tell you that you need to upgrade to the newest widget or risk falling behind in technology. That is how they get you!!! LOL!!! They prey on your GAS problem!!!

So how do we solve for this? I honesty don’t have the universal answer. For me it took about 40 years of buying too much stuff for a hobby and as you see above with the stack of POTA rigs, I am not there yet… I do know that I am starting to recognize it though and I am working towards scaling back the stack of cases so that I have room for other things in my shack. I hope this helps some of you out there to realize the same thing I realized and that you can do other things instead of buying the newest radio. Anyway, now that we have all did some self reflection, reach over and turn on that radio next to you and see who you can find on it.

73

David - WK4DS

QSL Mail call !!!

What have we here? Looks like a letter from the Azores!!! I don’t know why, but I have always enjoyed receiving these letters in the mail, and it brings me a little bit of joy to get them. Every time I see one of these, I get excited, no matter how long I have done this. This is why I still have QSL cards that I send out from time to time as well. The clue that it’s a QSL card is the Amateur Radio call signs on the envelope and typically the foreign postage is another clue as I normally do not write letters to people overseas.

Look at that antenna! No wonder he could hear me with my little paltry 5 watts of transmitter power. Normally, the stations that are overseas that actually will respond to my CQs when I do a POTA activation, are using antennas like this, or something similar and very high-quality receivers because I am transmitting into a compromise antenna with just five watts or maybe even less sometimes.

It never fails to amaze me how economically this postcard can be transported from one location on the globe to another for just a buck or two that astounds me due to the economy involved in moving this piece of paper.

Thanks for tagging along this morning while I drink my cup of coffee and read my cool letter from the Azores and until next time get your radio out and go make some contacts with it.

If you enjoy reading my blogs, please lock them and leave comments and share it around and all the usual things that makes my webpage more successful that would really be appreciate it and thank you!

Huntsville Hamfest 2022 AAR

So it has come and went again, the Huntsville Hamfest was alive and well this year with a strong showing from major companies as well as a sizeable boneyard! Who doesn’t like a good boneyard?!?

We started our morning by grabbing some coffee in Scottsboro on our way from Trenton and heading over to Huntsville. Since we had paid online we did not have to buy our tickets at the gate and we were able to immediately register, get a pin and go on into the Hamfest. I have to admit, I was a little bit taken aback when we got into the show iteself by seeing all of the vendors that were there. There were so many vendors in new equipment, product manufacturers and the boneyard was unbelievable. It was like I had went back in time 20 years to a hamfest. I have always been more interested in the boneyard than I have in new equipment so we focused most of our time wondering the boneyard looking at things from days gone by and occasionally buying stuff.

This was the second trip to the truck of the day… lol

We bought so much stuff that we had to go get a little red wagon cart out of the truck to haul it all back with. I finally bought an amplifier and a power supply to drive it, as well as a few antenna tuners and some other little odds and ends, OH YEAH! and a 20 meter hamstick for my POTA ops to reduce the kit size if possible on some outings. I don’t even remember what Roger bought other than the STACK of those green hard shell cases from GigaParts! Lol, I think he ended up with 4 of them before he was done! HaHa. He has so many portable radios that he wants to kit out and these are almost perfect right out of the chute. a little work and some closed cell foam and mine will house my Argonaut and all the associated stuff to use it for an activation.

We saw so much cool stuff that it is hard to remember it all. Things like vacuum tubes galore, along with all the panel meters ever made at one table, and if you look close enough, you can even find vintage crystals in a cigar box here and there.

It was a kit builder’s paradise! We found so many parts to build amps and tuners with and there was a table with nothing but little project kits (I failed to get a photo of that though…) .

We grabbed some lightening arrestors as you can never have too many of those… then started looking for cool old Ten Tec stuff. I was actually looking for two very specific things made by Ten Tec back in the day. One was a Hercules II amplifier and the other was the Collins mechanical filters for my Omni 7 radio. If you happen to read this and know where I can at least get the 500hz Collins filter I would really appreciate it.

Here are some of the Ten Tec rigs we found, minus the Pegasus and the Scout that I forgot to grab a photos of…

The mighty Orion 2 contesting rig even made an appearance!

Something else we noticed early on was the incredible number of Ameritron AL-811 amplifiers that was there! It seemed like every other table had one on it. That is an exaggeration of course, but it did seem like every time we looked up we saw another one. We saw so many that it actually became a little running joke between me and Roger.

About 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized we needed sustenance and grabbed some nutritious options from the snack bar onsite. As an aside, I have realized that I am now officially vegetarian too. At some point I figured out that I am allergic to beef (probably the result of a tick bite), so I decided to join my daughter, who is vegetarian due to medical issues arising from PANDAS, in being vegetarian as well. Something you need to understand here, I hate vegetables. Yeah, I said it. I cant stand vegetable soup or okra or butter beans, just cant stand most vegetables, but I am figuring it out…ever so slowly.

I don’t know what the big deal is with the whole division in the dietary community too, I just don’t order meat and mind my own business…simple. But you see these vegetarians throwing fits over restaurants not offering things compatible with their diets and meat-a-tarians making fun of the herbivores. I just dont get it, but who knows (obviously not me). I just know that if I don’t eat beef, I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with hives head to toe and itching all over for an hour.

Anyway, I got the fries and pretzel and they were quite delicious. Yes, the pretzel has butter on it and it was awesome! (I am not vegan…lol)

Once fueled up, it was back into the fray. Here are a few photos of some of the highlights I saw…

These keys were amazing! If you want a wonderful key built by a ham, this would be one that I would suggest, they were simply subline.

I even found the youtubers. Lol.

At the end of the day, we finally called it a done deal and headed home with our new treasures. All in all it was a great show and if you are within reasonable driving distance, I would say to give it a shot next year, it was well worth our trip this year to say the least. Thanks for following along and I hope you enjoyed the tour!

72

David - WK4DS