Dayton Ham Fest – Day 2
(NOTE: I originally started writing this post when still in Dayton, but I never finished it. I’ll wrap it up and post it now)
Well Day 2 is done and I’m hopefully finally winding down enough so I can get some sleep. I finally crashed last night around 3am and had to be up by 6:30am, so I could be downstairs for the ride to the ham fest. Needless to say I was beyond tired today.
As one would expect, the traffic today was lower then normal. I would say actually quite a bit lower then normal. Tomorrow is the critical day, Saturday is always the busy one. Today was the warm up actually. This year I was working the HT/mobile side of the main Icom booth. It was quite a bit different then working on the HF side. There was basically three questions which were asked over and over again.
* What is the difference between radio A, B and C?
* Icom’s programming software sucks/it should do this/etc
* My 20 year old hand held stopped working, can you fix it right now?
But mainly it was the radio A, B or C question over and over again. Eventually I start playing games just to talk about something different. Everything from asking about their clubs (which most were wearing t-shirts or hats with logs) to what cool stuff they have seen at the show so far. I’m really not the outgoing/extrovert type, so this kind of thing doesn’t come naturally to me, but man I would get tired of answering the same question over and over again. I finally had one ham ask me a real technical question about D-STAR and I almost jumped over the desk to hug him.
Since today the weather was nice, I hit the swap meet during my lunch break. The weather report calls for some rain tomorrow, so today is the time to hit the outside stalls. I don’t think this years mix of stuff was as good as last years. Either that or I missed the rows where the good stuff was hiding. I did pick up a few things, there was a table of tools that I got a set of wire strippers and mini-torx set for my second tool box. I was considering a service monitor for a couple minutes, but it would have been a pain in the butt to get home.
Tomorrow I’ll try to get around the inside booths, where all the “new stuff” lives. I think I’m going to get one of the KA7EXM power meter sets from Konga. (Hey Rodger!) I don’t really need a power meter, but I would really like to understand better how to use one and if I build it myself, I won’t feel so bad about burning it up playing with it. I also went to OSU with Rodger, so hopefully he’ll get a little bit of the purchase price.