The New Jersey Antique Radio Club is hosting a swap
meet/hamfest tomorrow. Despite my Mid-Atlantic roots (I was
born in New York), I have not ventured South past Danbury to
visit a swap meet in at least 10 or 15 years. The last time was
when I visited the now discontinued Mt. Beacon hamfest some
time ago. Sad that they stopped that one because I bought my
first military radio equipment there, a Kleinschmidt teletype
(RTTY) machine, and a Singer-Stoddart NM-20 shortwave receiver.
I started paying more attention to what's going on to the south
and west of me, radio wise thanks to my friend and fellow tech
nerd Harold who lives down in southern Westchester County. He
told me about the monthly swap meets down in Seaford out on
Long Island which I have yet to attend. There's supposedly a
lot of good old radio gear at Seaford, but they have it on a
Sunday at literally the crack of dawn and it's at least a
couiple of hours to get there. I've driven a longer distance to
visit Hosstraders/Near-Fest in New Hampshire, but that's a two
day event where I stay overnight, and I haven't been there
since 2014.
These days I find driving more than an hour to attend
an event that is only a few hours in duration to be a bit
excessive, so I try to find other things to do and/or places to
visit in the vicinity of the event. The swap meet this weekend
is in Parsippany, NJ (njarc.org). Down the road in Morris is a
Museum (morrismuseum.org) with a collection of automata, among
other displays and artifacts, that looks cool. On the way home,
in a roundabout manner, is New Paltz that has one of the
better art supply stores in the region, a pretty good outfitter
called Rock & Snow, and now Gary's Pickles who we discovered at
the food festival over at Walkway Over The Hudson. Now I can
justify driving down to a hamfest in New Jersey.
I'm looking for a transformer so I can build a power
supply for my AN/ART-13, and am picking up a AN/PRC-127 HT
(older Bendix King model). Hopefully there will be some other
interesting items there at reasonable prices.
