Belton Oct 4, 2025
A beautiful day for Texas’ best hamfests at Belton this Saturday. We had a good spotting of JSCARC members: Tom N3LLL, George AD5CQ, Jerry N5FWB, Tyler KJ5MCS, Keith KG5HOK, and Dave W5OC. Perhaps some more that I didn’t see?
In general, the equipment for sale were mostly a good variety of estate sales and folks cleaning out their hamshacks. As usual, most of the better finds were snatched up during Friday setup and early Saturday.
I’ve finally now fully appreciate how these hamfests really serve as an anchor to build friendship and fellowship with good friendly people that are immersed in this remarkable hobby. Arguably, it’s also called a disease!
Special congrats to Tyler KJ5MCS who come looking for a VHF/UHF radio and scored on a nice FTM-350 with accessories. Tyler was in attendance with his son Ethan who attends college nearby.
Keith KG5HOK and I hosted a vendor table (thanks for your help, Keith), and had a great time luring in customers and shamelessly delivering our used car salesmen pitches to get rid of the junk from my hamshack. All of the goodies found new homes, as we even gave much away for free. Hams are cheapstakes, so giving stuff away for free always works! For me, this is another successful effort to cleanup my attic with projects that were started 10-20 years ago, and will never get finished.
For me, I had two special highlights:
- Meeting Ron K5LLL (and son NN5DX). An extraordinary terrific gentleman who kindly tracked and worked me throughout my VHF rover contests.
- Finding a cool 442MHz cavity filter which I hope can be tuned to 432 MHz for my next VHF rovering adventure.
73 Dave W5OC
