SDR

I got back to the Green County Fairgrounds and Expo Center around 7:30 Saturday morning. I just don’t sleep well in hotels, and I didn’t see any benefit in sitting around the hotel room. Also, I figured that this would give me a chance to check out at least one more food vendor.

Hamvention 2017 food

Let me say this about the food. While some people think that the food was better this year than last, I really didn’t think so. The selection was bigger than at Hara Arena—there were vendors selling pork chop and T-bone steak sandwiches, for example—but I don’t think the quality was any better than at Hara, and in some cases, it was worse. Friday, for example, I had a really bad (and expensive) BBQ sandwich for lunch.

I also feel sorry for the community groups who manned the concessions at Hara. I don’t know how easy it’s going to be for them to replace the funds  they raised at Hara. It’s too bad that they couldn’t have been given the opportunity to serve food at the new venue.

Having said that, I did make a couple of good choices on Saturday. For breakfast, I ordered a breakfast sandwich from RB Foods, which was pretty good. For lunch, I had the cabbage rolls from Jean’s Home Cooking. I really enjoyed this. The cabbage rolls weren’t as good as my grandmother’s holubki (the Slovak word for stuffed cabbage), but it was close.

Another food vendor worth mentioning is Rader’s Ice Cream. They were making it right there on site, using what looked like a one-cylinder John Deer engine to power the ice-cream making machine. I didn’t have any of his ice cream, but it was very popular.

If you ate at any of the other food vendors, or have any other comments about the food, please comment below.

Another turn around the flea market

After eating breakfast, I took another turn around the flea market. It was much muddier than it was Friday morning. I was very careful about where I stepped, though, and luckily my shoes didn’t leak at all.

I found a couple of interesting things, although I didn’t buy anything. One radio that tempted me was a Hallicrafters S-200 Legionaire.

I owned one of these as a kid. It covered only the SW broadcast bands. They also made a general coverage version of this receiver, and I’ve seen many of those at hamfests, but this is the first time I’ve seen an S-200 in a long time.

The guy wanted $30 for it, which was probably a reasonable price, but I thought that I’d go back for it later and offer $20, if he still had it. Alas, I never got back to the flea market. It’s just as well, though. I’d probably never use it.

Another guy had a General Radio capacitance bridge. Being the measurement geek that I am, I was drawn to it, of course. It was in great shape, and we had a good time talking about it, as well as other General Radio gear. I didn’t buy it, of course. I would probably never use it, and I just don’t have the room for a big box like that. It was hard to resist, though.

As it turned out, I ended up not making a single flea market purchase, not even a single connector.

Saturday book sales again disappoint

Since Friday had been so disappointing with regard to book sales, I was hoping that Saturday would be a lot better. Unfortunately, while it was a little bit better, it was not even close to what I was hoping for.

I did, however, meet and talk with a lot of great people. I shared a laugh or two with Randy, KB3IFH, who does my QSL cards and my new business cards. He did  some “CW Geek” coasters for me, and I owed him some money.

Entry-level licensing

I also spent at least a fascinating 45 minutes with Bruce, K1BG. I’ve worked Bruce many time on 40m CW, and now I come to find out that Bruce is on the ARRL’s entry-level license committee. The committee’s charter is to make recommendations to the ARRL board regarding the entry level license.

This could take any number of different forms. They might recommend changes to the Technician Class license, but they might also recommend the establishment of an additional, but simpler, license with privileges that would give a newcomer a taste of most facets of ham radio from HF to VHF and UHF.

To be honest, I was kind of skeptical about this when I first read about it, but Bruce makes a very compelling case. He notes that the first Novice question pool consisted of only 28 questions, if you go by the number of questions found in the 1951 edition of The Radio Amateur’s License Manual. The Novice section of this manual is only four pages long, and doesn’t even have a question about Ohm’s Law! Over the years, this number grew, but slowly reaching 51 questions in  1968, when incentive licensing was established.

Bruce says that it’s his opinion that the number of teenagers getting amateur radio licenses declined as the test got more difficult. So, if we want to really attract young people into our hobby, we should have a Novice license, akin to what we had back in the day. By comparison, the current Tech test question pool has more than 430 questions! Food for thought there. I plan to keep on top of this topic and blog more about it after I investigate this some more.

Around 3:00 pm, I joined my friend, Mark, W8MP, in the County Hunter’s Forum. Mark and I have an ongoing debate as to what’s crazier: county hunting or my little side hobby of collecting QSL cards from stations whose callsigns spell words. One of the fellows who spoke at the forum, Bob, N4CD, has worked all counties nine times!

What was really fun about attending this meeting was that I actually got to work two people there whose callsigns spell words: W8TAX and W2RAN. Mark ran around and found two handhelds for us to work one another. What a great guy!

Social media meetup

At 3:30 pm, we had the annual social media meetup (see the photo below). By my count, there were 22 of us this year.Who says ham radio operators are all old guys? I’m the oldest one in this photo!

A short time after that, Bob, K0NR, wandered by my booth. I’m glad I got to meet Bob face-to-face. We actually go a long way back, back to the time I wrote for Test&Measurement World magazine. We’ve talked on the phone, and on the Internet, many times, but this is the first time we got to meet in person. Check out his take on Dayton 2017.

A last-minute impulse buy

Earlier in the day, I took a break and wandered quickly around some of the other halls. One of the things that stuck with me was the new RS-HFIQ SDR transceiver by HobbyPCB. I had actually signed up for their Kickstarter back in December, but for some reason cancelled my pledge. I’m not really sure why because if I hadn’t I would have already had one up and running.

At any rate, I mulled over buying the thing until it was just about time to go. By 4 pm, foot traffic by the booth had fallen way off, and by 4:10 pm, I decided to pack up for day. After I got my books all packed up, I hurried over to the HobbyPCB booth, hoping they were still open and that they still had one for me. Fortunately, they did, and I walked away with  an RS-HFIQ and the enclosure kit for the Hamvention price of $270.

It’s not an IC-7300, but with the HardRock 50W amp (which I already own), it’s about half the cost and most of the functionality (aside from the cool LCD screen). More on this in another blog post.

That’s all, folks

Well, that’s about it for my Dayton 2017 experiences. I had a rather uneventful drive home, arriving back in Ann Arbor about 8:30 pm that evening. I’m looking forward to next year, and I’m already thinking about what I can talk about. Perhaps another talk on CW, or perhaps I could organize a panel on licensing issues, including the new entry-level license. What do you think?