I attended a hamfest at the Sussex, NJ fairgrounds on Sunday, July 10th, in between spending a several days down the Jersey shore. Both locations were about as far away from each other as you could get in Jersey but what the heck. Hamfest was indoors and outdoors. Hamfest seemed to be well attended. Took a quick walk early in the morning and spotted boatanchors and boatanchors parts almost on every other tailgate. Since I was setup inside, I didn't have a lot of time to stop at each location and browse. I was told that the initial outside location grew to capacity very quickly (it was pretty filled up when I walked through at about 7:30 AM) and they had to expand the tailgaters to another location on the other side of the indoor building setups. The inside area had a lot of traffic throughout the morning.
Even Bob Heil, from Heil microphone fame was there supporting a new NorthEast vendor, showing demos of his latest microphones. Although I have seen and talked with Bob at Dayton and on the air, this was the first time I had the pleasure of working next to him and was able to get a close up feel of all his products. Bob did some excellent demo comparsions between the RE-20 microphone and his new PR-40 product. Considering the price, mystique, and hype of the RE-20 over the years, I had expected a world of difference between these models in favor of the RE-20. The PR-40 actually had a better sound on the low end and seemed to have a much better brilliance and clarity on the high end. Bob's demos ran both of these microphones flat with no equalization added. You can view more info on this mike here:
http://www.heilsound.com/amateur/pr-40.htmBob says there are a number of guys running these mikes on traditional vintage AM rigs, modified broadcast transmitters, and SSB rigs around the country. If I remember the story correctly, Joe Walsh also provide lots of input into the design of this mike.
Even Julius, of W2IHY fame, was there at the hamfest but only as a "buyer". He stopped by several times and we all had some very interesting chats about equalizers, microphones, and amateur radio future audio trends. Also a very interesting guy, very funny, and a high degree of audio technical knowledge. Standing there between Bob and him while they "talked the technical" was like being a fly on the wall. Julius is also going "software defined". He just ordered one of those new SDR-1000 software defined rigs.
As for me, I picked up a carton of original service manuals (about 150 of them) for $20 and some parts. I finally packed up around 2:30 PM, since I wanted to get back to the Jersey shore fun, and when I was driving out, I still saw that a number of outside vendors were still set up. It was a great time there.
