This Friday and Saturday were the 60th annual Melbourne Hamfest and the Florida State ARRL Convention and as you can see by that link, the 60th such get together (not every year is the state convention). I've mentioned this activity many times, and it's one of two shows we go to pretty much every year, partly because the 1976 Melbourne Hamfest was the first hamfest I ever went to. The other is the Orlando Hamcation, which has become one of the biggest in the country.
This subject should really be broken in two parts. First off, there's a lot of new hams that frequent the same blogs I do and I don't know if other bloggers have talked about local hamfests. Should you go? More than likely. Why should you go? That's marginally harder to answer because it kind of depends on your local show and you won't know what they're like until you go - or talk with someone who goes regularly. The local hamfest is likely to have lots of used equipment for sale, quite possibly a lot of new equipment and lots of opportunities to learn. The exact mix of used vs. new depends, again, on your particular show. Melbourne used to have more new gear than it has had for the last couple of years as the commercial sellers have gone elsewhere one by one. It's a good place to make meatspace connections with local hams.
There are generally talks by locals who can be regarded as Subject Matter Experts, be it a specific maker of ham gear (this year's was a Yaesu expert) or some other expert the crowd may like to see. I gave a talk on modern HF receiver design back in 2011's 'fest, based on a paper in a trade journal that I had published the previous year.
Like hamfests in general, the Melbourne show seems to have trouble getting a nice big crowd. The 1976 show I mentioned was a full weekend show, Saturday and Sunday. Until relatively recently, like 2010 or so, the 'fest was the first full weekend in September. They moved to October after a couple of years with hurricanes caused it to be cancelled. That has been changed to Friday afternoon and 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Saturday.
People have been predicting the demise of hamfests for almost as long as I can remember; certainly since eBay became a hamfest that's going 24/7/365. If nothing else, they will evolve and change.
The big hamfests seem to have a different niche and are doing better. The Orlando Hamcation is doing well and bills themselves as the "second largest hamfest" in the US, behind the "granddaddy", Dayton Hamvention. Usually just referred to as "Dayton" by hams; as in "you goin' to Dayton this year?", Hamvention has outlived the city's HARA arena it had been held in forever and after our last visit to Dayton in 2016, they moved to nearby Xenia, Ohio. Behind those two, though, and the handful of large 'fests, how well they'll do is an open question.
Photo of the International Space Station from the Platinum Coast Amateur Radio Society website, the club organizing and putting on the hamfest.
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