Attended the Columbus Hamfest

Yesterday I attended the Columbus Hamfest. It is a fairly small hamfest. I overheard someone say that about 450 tickets were sold. The hamfest is hosted by the Voice of Aladdin Amateur Radio Club at their Aladdin Shrine Complex. This facility is located in the Easton area for those familiar with Columbus. Things are straightforward. An admission ticket is $5, and tables inside are free, and spaces out in the parking lot are free. The admission ticket is placed in the prize drum. They held hourly door prizes, and also smaller door prizes every fifteen minutes or so. They also were giving away a Yaesu VX-7R as the grand prize. I believe that our local Universal Radio donated many of the items for the prizes. I won one of the smaller prizes and got to take my pick. I choose the 2008 edition of the Passport to World Band Radio. There were two forums: a traffic handling forum, and an ARRL forum. There was also a testing session. I attended the hamfest primarily to help represent the Capital City Repeater Association (CCRA). Our club was able to handle a few renewals and about three former members signed up again.














Initially, I had not planned on buying anything. It was fairly late in the morning before I even left the CCRA table. I took a quick walk around the inside tables. There is never very much that I am interested at those tables: laptop computers (when I already have a laptop), LED flashlights, disk drives, connectors, and so on. I then walked outside. There were only about eight or so people set up out there. There were also a couple of neat static displays. The Red Cross Disaster Relief Services had their communication truck there, and there were two other rather impressive communication trucks supposedly belonging to the City of Columbus, and Franklin County. I did spot one thing that intrigued me however, and I made an impulse purchase. A husband and wife team, S & G Engineering, were selling what they call the Eagle One antenna system. It is designed for 80 through 10 meters. It consists of a wire element inside of a collapsible fiberglass pole (the orange and black poles in the picture below). That pole is clamped to a metal pole that fits inside a tripod. An antenna tuner, and some counterpoise wires attached to the tripod are necessary. We'll have to see how it works.

I received an email before the event from one of the organizers. They implied that this may have been the last year for the Columbus Hamfest. I have attended the hamfest before, and attendance seemed at least as strong as last year. Hopefully, they will continue it.

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