Melbourne hamfest report and the Lucky SOB!

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Tue Sep 16 19:51:00 2003

  They held the Melbourne Fla hamfest this part weekend. This is the first
hamfest of the season and it's always one of the best. One of our fellow CC
Listers was visiting from out of state and I invited him to go along. (Now
I wish I hadn't!) I arrived at the crack of dawn Saturday morning. Almost
immediately I found a big cardboard box full of plastic parts bins filled
with ICs and other parts from the late '60s for $5. Later found the
accessory kit for the Tektronix Engine Analyzer. I'd heard of these but
never seen one before. It has a rotary motion sensor, several pressure
sensors (5,000 and 45,000 PSI!) and sensors for both horizontal and
vertical acceleration. They connect to a specail time base and four channel
amplifier for the 561 O'scope. You can use them to monitor cylinder head
pressure, combustion chamber pressure, knock, engine pinging, vibrations,
bearing wear and all kinds of other engine parameters. I also got a
Pro-Log Z-80 front panel similar to the 8080 one that was offered on this
list a couple of weeks ago. Meet up with Steve Robertson and got a huge
stack of 8" floppy disks and six drives. He was cleaning out and wanted
them gone. Found lots of nice stuff in the stack including many original
disks for CPM, WordStar, Dbase II and others.

  But the real find of the day was made by the visiting CC Lister. He
didn't even show up till after 12 and by then many of the vendors had
packed up and gone home. BUT, this lucky SOB walked down the FIRST row and
before he got to the end, he'd found a mint Hero Jr with all the manuals
and a mint Heathkit ET-3400 with the manuals and in the original box! For
obvious reasons he prefers to remain nameless!

   Joe
Received on Tue Sep 16 2003 - 19:51:00 BST