[Milsurplus] Timonium Ham fest

[Ray Fantini]

A quick look at the Timonium ham fest. Everyone knows that this is the first year that you were not able to tailgate outdoors and that it’s now Saturday only, no longer a two day event. With that in mind many have predicted the demise of this event. It is held in the same building that they have always used for indoor sales, the Cow Palace and the number of indoor sellers appears to me to be around the same number of indoor sellers that they had back three and four years ago. The last couple years there were not as many sellers in the building as there were today. I also noticed a lot less of the professional or full time sellers that usually frequent the ham fest, in the past the sellers of new equipment were located in a separate building and maybe that’s still the case. I have no interest in SDR or MFJ junk so I do not frequent that building and do not know if they were there or not but they were not in the Cow Palace.  With the exception of tubes and parts and maybe a couple receivers and tuning units there was not a lot of the old ww2 junk, surprised not to see any of the butchered or cut up ARC-5 stuff that usually shows up at fest and I did not see any clean ARC-5 stuff. Did not see any BC-348, ART-13 radios and thought that was odd being that they are usually there. There were newer radios being that I did see a couple WJ-8716 receivers priced in the hundreds of dollars and a Harris 590 for over a thousand. Ontario Surplus was there with at least three or four other selling mostly military equipment including one person who I bought a LS-671/VRC loudspeaker and a MT-6352/VRC mount both for under $10 each for my SINGARS radio so the bargains were out there. The same seller had VRC-12 mounts, accessories and microphones for all around $5. In the south room of the building another seller had many modern items including a General Dynamics data entry system I picked up for $50 and a Harris Falcon series automatic antenna tuner, the smaller 20 watt unit that I picked up for $20 and ended up selling before I left the fest. The same seller had several AM-7238/VRC VHF amplifiers along with a couple external URC-200 power supplies and a bunch of SINGARS stuff that followed Tom home. They had couple boxes of new cables and I picked up a new CX-13492 loudspeaker cable for $5 that has a 02/08 date code. Imagine that if your one of those “doesn’t buy anything built after 1945” you would have been disappointed but for me I think it was a good fest. Did see Mr. Smith there but do not know if there was any operations from around the fest or parking lot, I did not bring any radios to operate at that event and because of the complexity of selling there did not sell this year, will concentrate most efforts on Dayton.
RF