[Milsurplus] Ham-Com impressions

[Patrick Jankowiak]

I have a few impressions about Ham-com this year. I realize it is not
over till Sunday eve. but I have been selling in the flea market so I
will make comments about that mostly.

There's a mix on comments relating to ham-com, 6 Meters, AM, and
military radio stuff.

QST on CD's were available, all of them! My friend Terry Murphy of
Radio Era Archives made them for QST. He was at ham-com.

I did have my first 'real' 6 meter QSO's at Ham-Com. It was all by
military surplus radios. We were on 52.5 with a 150Hz tone. There was
a PRC-77, a PRC-25, a Racal TRA-967, and two PRC-68B's. The military
radio enthusiasts often show up, but usually there are only one or
two. I carried the Racal backpack with me while I did the parking lot
swap meet, and left the PRC-77 at my table. 2M and 440 rigs failed to
reach from the inside swap meet to the outside parking lot, but the
good old 6 meter stuff did great! I ran into one guy who said he only
does AM on 6M. I will have to do something about AM in that respect. I
have a 20 watt (carrier) transmitter I will fix up.

The swap meets were ok, with the outside one being rather small since
it was 95 degrees, humid, and an ozone 'red' alert day. About 4500
people attended the event I think. Everyone said the seminars were
great.

There were many vendors with reasonable pricing, but others had was
what I consider 'rube' pricing. I guess those vendors don't really
want to sell, just display. Who am I to judge, maybe they know what it
is worth and I don't. 

I have to go on a short rant here:

$270 for a Johnson Viking II which has been modified and is in
questionable working order, aside from having various mechanical
defects in the PA tuning assembly and being beat-up was laughable.

$600 for a Heathkit linear with two 572B's is just ridiculous. Crafty
ol' Bubba sitting there with a table of ham and CB gear and professing
it to put out 1KW and offering to get surly (more surly than usual)
with anyone who says otherwise is certainly suspect. I am sure 'his
meter' did say 1000 watts. Come on, it's a 600W SSB PEP output amp at
best.. and much over 80W carrier on AM will cook the tubes.

Maybe I am too discerning about specifications. To me, 1KW means 'your
choice of any power Output level from 0 to 1KW, 24 hours a day, 7 days
a week, for the rated lifetime of the tubes'. This is what I call the
"AM and RTTY Spec". My elmer years ago enlightened me about CCS and
ICAS, and these lessons hold value. "contnuous key down" he used to
call it, and he ran a MARS RTTY net.

In the 1970's, the home Hi-Fi industry was forced to rate their
amplifiers in RMS watts of Contimuous Output, not "peak",
"intermittent peak power", or "music power". This has never happened
to RF amplifier manufacturers and so there is confusion for both
sellers and buyers, especially for older equipment where the
manufacturers took gross liberties with design and power claims. Radio
gear, especially quality linear amplifiers, lasts for decades. 

I know that my National NCL-2000 linear amplifier is really an 800
watt amplifier. On SSB with uncompressed voice it can do 1100 watts
PEP, but give it some real speech compression in the SSB exciter, or
an AM or RTTY signal, and the real rating is 800 watts PEP, 200W
carrier.

End of rant, back to Ham-com, 

I picked up three 254W triodes for $5 each. I will have to try one of
these at reduced input in my Link 250UFS 6M tranceiver, since I can't
seem to find a 250TH for a reasonable price. Everyone wants $75-200
for them. This is probably because of all the BC-610's around. The 254
is rated 100W dissipation, and so it will be enough to get the Link on
the air, and it fits the socket, has almost the same capacitances,
needs a bit more RF drive, and uses the same filament voltage.

I need to find some 816's for the driver power supply. None were to be
had but I was quoted $20. I have a short to fix, it's what ruined the
816's. They got so hot the filaments sagged too close to the plates
and the tubes flash over.

There were also quite a few opportunists who were going about, buying
stuff, and trying to sell it on their own tables later at a much
higher price. This almost always fails, but they never learn!

My best example of this was 15 years ago at the first saturday sale
(local dallas monthly ham swap), where I sold a tektronix digital
scope for $1200, down from the $1500 I had asked. I got it in trade by
fixing a large radar system on a guy's 40' boat, and really had no use
for such an expensive lab item at the time. The TEK catalog said it
was $23,000 and 5 years old, so therefore the super-cheap price. In
any case, some guy who dealt in test gear really wanted it. I am sure
he knew the catalog price because he was after all a dealer and didn't
dispute the catalog I showed him. I took the cash. An hour later, some
T.I. RF engineers came by, and made some smart remark about who was
stupid enough to buy it. I didn't understand, but they explained it
was worth $1200 full retail at best, and they'd never pay that much.
30 minutes later, the opportunist came by and wanted me to take it
back and refund the cash. I said no, because I had not only come down
from the price, but there was no dispute over the price and he had
practically begged me to sell it to him, to take a small deposit while
he went to get the cash balance. Apparently the RF engineers went to
the opportunist's swap meet table and mocked the $2200 price he had
put on the unit. Why do engineers stir up such trouble for their own
amusement? I will never know.

I also picked up a Collins 618-S1, which is an old commercial aircraft
HF AM XCVR covering 2.5-25MHz, for $50 and the seller threw in a box
of old octal and miniature tubes, and carried the 70 lb. rig for me!
This is a real quality rig, and fortunately the Collins Collector's
don't care much about black-box commercial-military gear, so these
things are always cheap. The outside was dirty, but inside, it is as
clean as a whistle and has that great 'old radio' smell. I wish I knew
exactly what that smell is. I could bottle it and sell it. I opened it
up after dragging it to my spot to look at the insides, and upon
discovering the fragrance, invited a couple people standing around to
take a whiff. They all said 'yep, that't the old radio smell'!

I took alot of junk, indeed, these are some of my 'junk boxes' of old
parts, and those sold pretty well. It is better to have a stack of 50
$1 bills than a single $20! And people love to dig through junque for
that special part!

I also took some 'good' equipment, a PRC-47, two high end TEK and
Leitch video signal generators, and a couple of distribution amps, but
no one was interested! Go figure, I thought ATV was a big thing. 

Well so that is my report anyway!