I feel a little guilty. I haven’t paid for a Hamvention ticket in several years. When I worked for ARDC, I had a vendor pass. That was nice because I could park in the vendor parking lot directly behind the fairground buildings. Last year, I finagled a media badge as a member of the ICQ Podcast. This year, I was issued a speaker’s badge (more about my talk in an upcoming post).
Not having to pay for a badge is not what makes me feel guilty, though. Aside from perhaps the media badge, I certainly gave back to Hamvention in some way. They got their money’s worth.
What does make me feel a little guilty is not having to wait in line until 9 am to get in. When you have a speaker badge or vendor badge, you can just walk right in.
This year, I arrived at the Greene County Expo Center a little before 8:00 am, parked my car, walked right up to the speaker/vendor window and picked up my badge, then walked right into the fairgrounds. How cool is that?
This worked out really well. A friend of mine wanted me to visit the HRO booth and purchase a radio for him, and since I got in early, I was able to beat the crowds. The guys behind the counter were a little miffed at first as they weren’t quite ready for customers, but they accommodated me, and I was very thankful to them for that.
Next, I stopped by the Linux in the Ham Shack booth. This has become a tradition with me, and I always enjoy saying hello to Cheryl, W5MOO; Bill, NE4RD; and in the past, Russ, K5TUX. Unfortunately, Russ is no longer with us, but it was still nice to check in with Bill and Cheryl.
After visiting with the LHS crew, I tromped around the flea market for a bit. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but I always like to see what people are selling.
I was kind of interested in a device that one guy was selling – a Gonset Model 3022 3-Way Code Oscillator. I’d never seen one of these before. It’s really a multi-purpose station accessory. It can be used as a code practice oscillator, but also as a CW sidetone generator or an AM phone monitor. The guy was asking $30 for it, though, and it was still pretty early, so despite his heavy sales pitch, I passed on it. I told him that I might be by later to see if he still had it.
I found another guy who was selling ham radio coffee mugs. There were a couple of those that I found amusing, including one that read “FT8” inside the international no symbol. He also had one that read, “Education is important, but ham radio is importanter.” Since I knew that my wife would kill me if I brought home another coffee mug, I passed on those, too.
Other than that, I didn’t really find anything that I wanted to buy in the flea market. Perhaps one reason is that there seemed to be fewer flea market vendors this year. There were big gaps between vendors in some of the aisles. I’m thinking that with such high gas prices this year, many sellers decided to skip Hamvention altogether.
More about Day 3 in my next blog post.
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