Two weekends ago was the local radio and communications museum’s swap meet. This is one of my regular events because I’m a member of the museum, and it’s only a 30 minute drive away on a Saturday morning. More often than not I’m also tailgating, which I did this past time. It was a good meet, although I did more trading than selling. Still though, I came home with less stuff than I arrived with, and a little more cash. The major acquisitions were a couple of WW2 aircraft command set radios which I have been getting into as of late, a 150 MHz. Tektronix 454 oscilloscope, and a WW2 vintage ABA-1 IFF transmitter/receiver which I discovered will go down into the 70cm ham band for AM and CW operation. The best part of the swap comes at the end of the day when the museum gives away whatever is left on their tables before dumpstering it. Going through the various boxes there were a few transformers and junk radio chassis that I gutted for some nice variable capacitors, and inductors. Not a bad haul.

Managed to get the workshop/lab a little more cleaned up and organized over the weekend. Put a little HF and VHF (6m and 2m) ham station on a table in the corner, but still need to put up antennas. I’ll be doing mostly CW on the old HF Novice sub-bands, and weak-signal on VHF. There are also a couple 2 meter FM simplex frequencies that see local use in addition to 146.52 MHz.

The Novice class ham license is a thing of the past with Technician being the new entry-level license for Amateur Radio. The Tech ticket is mostly VHF+ which in reality means the VHF/UHF bands at 1.2 GHz. and below. There is no off-the-shelf gear above 1.2 GHz., and I don’t think the average newly-minted Tech is going to homebrew any microwave weak signal gear despite being allowed to operate up there. Tech class ticket holders however do have some HF privileges. They can run sideband on 10 Meters between 28.300-28.500 MHz, and they can run CW on small portions of 80, 40, 15, and 10 Meters. Back in the analog TV days, a lot of hams would scrounge the 3.579 MHz. colorburst crystal out of an old TV set and set up on 80 Meters. There are still a few hams that do this today, the informal CW OP group called the Color Burst Liberation Army (CBLA).