In my early days of Amateur radio I used to visit THE national radio Rally at the Granby Halls in Leicester in November. This finished many years ago and it has now morphed into the RSGB National Hamfest that is hold at the Newark & Notts Showground in October. Viewers of the BBC Programme "Bargain hunt" will have seen it many times as it often has antique fairs used in the series.
It is held over two days, Friday and Saturday so I decided to go on the Friday. It is a 120 mile trip from Malvern which took 2.5 hours, arriving 15 minutes before the official opening time of the indoor exhibits but the flea market was fully in motion, and it was sunny. I made a few purchases from the Fleamarket. A Wouxun KG-UVD1P 144/70MHz FM Transceiver , (now I can speak to WA5VJB when he comes to England) a 13.5V 22A PSU which cost £1 and a bag of fifty 10uF 25V tantulum Capacitors for 50pence . Most Interesting was meeting G4AEH who was assisting a seller and catching up on old times, mentioned in my blog entry "blast from the past"
I then went indoors. There were RSGB stalls and the RSGB bookshop, so I used my £5 off voucher to buy the EI5GQ "Building a Transceiver" book (which was technically interesting but included some "non sentences" making comprehension hard!). I had a "long" lunch with G4HUP and caught up with G3XTT, G4BAO, G7OCD, G4KUX, G4FSG and G3CWI. I picked up the pre-ordered 4+4 ele 6/4m antenna from Innovantennas and just about fitted it into the Car. There were a few interesting items, if one looked close enough. One was a Telford Communications TC10 receiver that was used as a 28-30MHz tunable IF for 2m/4m when combined with the matching G8AEV converters and a Hughes 1077TWT (which I used for the 24GHz USA record QSO) which had a beaten up PSU . Both were resisted, I did go to buy a moonraker tripod based mast, but they sold out at the reduced price very quickly and no more would be available until Saturday; too late for me. I did buy a "drive on" base for my portable mast and a couple of pieces of ex-military RG213 for the new antenna. The rally ended at 4pm, sharp. The return took almost 3 hours due to the dense Friday afternoon traffic. Overall an Interesting day out
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