SCAVENGING: The ARS Guide to Hamfest Dumpster Diving
By Bill Jones, KD7S
The ARS Sojourner
Hamfests and swapmeets are excellent sources of offbeat electronic treasures. Often you can find items you didn't even know you needed until you actually see them. For example, at a local hamfest I recently discovered a cigar box full of National Velvet Vernier drives priced at a buck apiece. In the same box were numerous insulated shaft couplers and some old Bakelite knobs. You won't find anything this good hanging on the walls at Radio Shack.

For some inexplicable reason sellers refuse to put their best merchandise up front in the center of their tables where it belongs. Instead of using that space to display a mason jar full of half used spools of magnet wire, they put a Kenwood TS-440S there instead. It's not uncommon to see tables littered with 2-meter handhelds instead of variable capacitors. So where do you find the wire and capacitors? As often as not they're underneath the table in a closed-up cardboard box labeled 'junk'. That's where I do most of my shopping in the hamfest equivalent of the dumpster.

If you're not convinced that the best bargains are the ones not displayed, consider this. I recently found an extruded aluminum enclosure in a cardboard box in the bed of a pickup truck. The enclosure was originally meant to hold a battery pack for a vintage portable telephone. I saw it as a cabinet for an indestructible backpacking rig centered around the new Small Wonder Labs DSW transceiver. The top shelf is just the right size to hold a AA battery pack while the bottom compartment is a perfect fit for the transceiver board. Extra space at either end could be used to store a set of in-the-ear headphones and maybe even a small hand key or some paddles. When I asked the price, the seller said, "Take it. It ain't worth nothin' anyhow."

In another case I spied a box filled to the brim with various bits and pieces of military surplus stuff. The box itself was all but hidden beneath the seller's table. At the very top was a control head for an old army frequency meter. Next to that was a badly chipped base insulator for a jeep-mounted whip antenna. A little further down were a couple tube sockets from a BC-610 transmitter. At the bottom of the heap was a very interesting portable antenna wound on a double reel with a retractable handle. On one side of the reel was about 60 feet of flexible, stranded antenna wire, an insulator and about 100 feet of Dacron line. Wrapped around the opposite side of the reel were four more lengths of stranded wire. These were soldered together at one end and connected to a heavy duty alligator clip. The seller was thrilled to get two dollars for it. I would have paid much more.

Two years ago I bought a brand new 3Ah gel-cell battery for a dollar. The seller had a half case of them. They had exceeded their 'best used by' date but mine still holds a charge perfectly. Far from being prominently displayed, these batteries were stuck in a corner of the back row on a tarp thrown on the ground. Obviously the seller considered them to be practically worthless. Maybe so, but I can't count the number of QSOs that little battery has given me.

Hamfest dumpster diving doesn't mean you have to actually climb inside the trash bins. But unless you're in the market for a Kenwood TS-440S or a 2-meter handheld, check out the junk boxes and freebie bins first. Trust me. That's where the good stuff is.

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Bill Jones, KD7S, an avid QRP operator, builder and outdoorsman, is a contributing editor to The ARS Sojourner living in Sanger, CA