Swap Meet 2014
Saturday, September 6, 2014, 10:00 AM—3:00 PM Red Cross Building, 60 Hawthorne St., Medford, OR (across from Hawthorne Park)
It’s that time of year again. Summer waning, Labor Day, back to school, and the RVARC Swap Meet. Time for going through your shacks, your garage, and your attic for ham-related items you a) don’t use anymore, b) don’t want anymore, c) never really used in the first place, or d) that you want to sacrifice to appease the XYL or OM.
Call it a purge, an unburdening, or a catharsis.
Be ruthless. Do you really need that box full of 600V transformers? Those two boxes of air-variable capacitors? Your fifty-year collection of dipole baluns? Do you have a collection of vacuum tubes you’re hording for the apocalypse? How many code-practice oscillators do you need (and how long has it been since you operated CW)? Are any of those tuna-can rigs you built still working? Do you still have those shoe boxes of straight keys you’ve thought of donating to a radio museum for a big tax write-off?
If you can answer any of these and lots of other stuff as true, then why not spend the next few weeks going through your junque and bring as much as you can to the swap meet?
Since it’s been publicized in all the ham clubs from Roseburg or Redding, and from Bend to Crescent City, and on the Oregon repeater forum reflectors, and on several Oregon nets such as the Tuesday Oregon Swap Net (7:00p at 146.94 PL136.5), and will be appear in S.W. Oregon media outlets in a week or so . . . well, you won’t be the only one with things to sell. More to the point, there’ll be a lot more people to buy.
73, Todd K7TFC
From the September 2014 issue of The Repeater.
From the November 2014 issue of The Repeater.
At the club’s annual swap meet in September, the technology of all but the first few decades of amateur radio was on display. Vacuum tubes, transmitting coils, high-voltage variable capacitors, quartz crystals, and “boat-anchor” rigs from the 1950s were juxtaposed with software-defined radios, with everything in between in various hybrid combinations.
