This was a busy weekend. Starting Saturday at 8am ET, the IARU HF contest started. Bands were very noisy but during the day/evening on Sat and for 30 mins on Sun morning I made 111 contacts. Countries outside of the US (though I got Hawaii again) were: Brazil, Cayman Islands, Canada, Argentina, Netherlands, Italy, Slovenia, Serbia, Ecuador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Austria, Czech Republic, Madeira Islands, Cape Verde, Canary Islands, Trinidad & Tobago, St Pierre & Miquelon, Aruba & Columbia. There were some very large pileups to cut through and my 100 watts, it was persistence vs pure power that paid off.

After making a couple contacts on Sunday morning I set off for the Sussex County hamfest. It is the largest hamfest I’ve been to so far. Took a while to just walk around. It had the usual assortment of crap that I can’t believe people would even look at let alone buy, but there was a lot of really interesting stuff to check out. One fellow had a Kenwood MC-60 desk mic I’ve been looking at picking up which he said was used twice but it looked a bit more used then that though it had the original box and instructions. He wanted $100 for it which is the same as or a bit more then you’d pay on eBay so I walked away.

I also saw the Midland 13-898B CB base station I had when I turned 13 yrs old and another vendor had the Turner Plus Three microphone I used with it. The vendor with the CB said I could take it for $5 but I wasn’t interested in bringing home something I didn’t need even it it was $5.

Saw lots of BARA club members and some other folks I also know.  Spent about 2.5 hours there and took off to head home and process the log from the contest.