Visited the swap meet at the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum in
Windsor, CT last weekend to sell some excess junk, and find new bargains.
Most of the tables were previously reserved (mine was), and that surprised
me because the indoor winter swaps traditionally don't see much action.
The morning was busy, and it stayed busy until about 11:30 when the museum
announced that everything on their sale table was now free. I walked away
with two 1970's vintage Icom IC-30A 70cm FM transceivers with a full load
of crystals, and two different editions of the old Red and Black ARRL
Single Sideband For Radio Amateur book, one from the 1950s and another
from the 1970s. The Windsor swap meet gets a lot of audiophiles, media
collectors, retro-computing enthusiasts, and other non-ham radio nerds so
it's a good swap if you're looking for oddball radio stuff without a lot
of competition.
The SSB books are useful if you want to build your own HF sideband gear,
or maybe work on older SSB rigs you own. I'm an advocate of having gear
you can fix yourself, and having the knowledge to fix it. DIYing your own
stuff is the final step in that process. The Icom 440 rigs are old-school
solid state construction that you can repair with a modest workbench, and
will outlast a Baofeng by decades. That's not bad for stuff that was about
to get tossed in a dumpster.
