Belton Hamfest hails as the largest hamfest in Texas held twice a year- Spring and Fall. This venue is a conveniently located equi-distance from the surrounding big, populated cities of Houston, San Antonio, Dallas/FW, and a bit closer for Austin-ites.
It’s still a boring 3.5-hour drive from Houston/Clear-Lake, assuming traffic is clear. Sympathies to Keith KG5HOK who hit a bad traffic jam on I45 which his car navigation wildly re-routed him through the street system of downtown Houston to catch reconnection to I-290. He lost an hour from this ridiculous and unnecessary side-trip provided by his artificially intelligent navigation system.
Unlike previous hamfests, I didn’t plan to sell any radios nor amps. I worked an objective to clear out the sitting worthless junque in my upstairs workroom which meant ejecting smaller, older, and non-working projects and parts that no longer had that sparkly feeling of satisfaction of fascination in my mind just knowing I had it in my possession.
The turnout was markedly better since the days of CV-19, so that was good. Still, it’s etched in my mind that the number of vendors and buyers were lower in number. Again, the sign of less experimenters (since there were many parts and projects for sale), and the reduction in size of the hobby participants. Still 80% of the attendees were babyboomers or older.
Keith met up with me on Friday afternoon at the parking lot. I arrived earlier since he hit that reroute due to a traffic accident. After we met up, I had already bought 2 broken radios- TS-690S and an IC-736 both from Byron W5FH. Byron was the gentleman who sold me the Hygain TH7DX that’s current on top of the W5RRR tower. Did I need 2 project radios, if my mission is to clean out my ham shack/work area? No, but it’s super fun to fix broken radios at cheap prices. So, by day’s end I also bought a lightning struck TS-2000 transceiver as well. In all honesty, I like the notion of have spare HF radios which may potentially serve a loaner to newly licensed ham radio students. So, this satisfies my troubleshooting repair disease and fulfills a noble purpose- perfect!
Not too much to report on the table selling activity except that we had lots of fun with passerby’s and other sellers, admitting how cheap we hams are. I had many items for sale at $1 and $2, and yet it felt like that was breaking their banks when they reluctantly opened their wallets filled with $20 and $100 bills. I had a bunch of stuff for FREE as well and literally had to force people to take them. Good stuff, too- like nice tool cases, power supplies, etc. I no longer have the notion that anyone should go to these hamfest to make reasonable deals. I should know, since I never buy stuff at these venues unless they are 1/2 the price or lower than eBay.
LOTS of stuff remained unsold by many ignorant and ambitious sellers.
A few highlights for me:
- Seeing our other JSCARC member, Tom N3LLL, hosting his seller’s table
- Keith and I having terrific supper at a greasy spoon Mexican restaurant in Temple.
- Getting to meet and chat with a couple of expert VHF contesters (Tim W5TRL, Kyle KA5D) with whom I had made QSOs during the ARRL Sept VHF Contest
- Telling John W5ZG that he would soon be famous. That is, two days ago, QST informed me that they accepted an article I submitted, “A Visit to A Super Collector” which featured my visit to his ham shack last year.
- Chatting with Dave K5YFO from the Cowtown K5COW club. He kindly offered to give us details for a future club build project- an SDR/FT8 ADX Arduino radio.
- Chatting with Ham Threads, the company who specializes in ham radio logo shirts. George AD5CQ mentioned them at the club meeting when this topic came up. Keith and I collected good info to report back to the club.
Excellent report. –AD5CQ