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.
I haven't been to a hamfest since 1995. I had to pretty much put the hobby on hold when I moved to Missouri due to family situations. The preceding 10 years I helped put on the annual hamfest in Amarillo, TX by the Panhandle Amateur Radio Club. It was a lot of work. Many of those years I was the chairman of the hamfest committee. Some years it was really difficult to get people involved in something that required that much work.
ReplyDeleteNow that I am retired, I would love to get back into the hobby, but once again my family and living situation is not conducive. A friend wanted me to go to the hamfest in Kansas city several times the past few years, but it would have caused a fight with my wife so I didn't. Dealing with her dementia is a definite challenge.
Where's the cutoff between "big" and not? I find it interesting that Dayton and Hamvention are doing so well, vs. what I see here locally, in CO. Ten years ago, hamfests were much bigger. Now, they're almost not worth attending. A very large club gave up on theirs this year, though another stepped in and held a 2nd (for them) at the same time/place. But they're much more a place to just hang out and see folks in person, rather than buy / sell, at least for me, and others I talk to.
ReplyDeleteI note what seems to be a positive feedback loop - fewer attendees make it less worthwhile for vendors, and fewer vendors leads to fewer attendees.
It seems that I also see mainly older guys, and very few young hams. I don't know if this correlates to fewer young people getting into the hobby, because I don't know whether that's just an unsubstantiated assertion. But if true, then it seems that younger people have less interest in socializing in that way, and buying used gear.
- jed
Ugh! Poor sentence construction there at the end. Well, you know what I mean, eh?
Delete- jed
That question about big and not so big is a tough one. I really don't know if the statistics even exist to answer that, so I have even less clue where to go to answer it. Dayton is Dayton, so to speak, because of being "firstest with mostest" and as the manufacturers of top end ham gear started releasing all their new big announcements at Dayton, it was easier for them to spread out to a 3 day fest.
DeleteOrlando Hamcation is in February in the same county as Disney World, and a mess of other tourist attractions. They expanded to Friday a few years ago and I always thought it came down to this: if you're working the stereotypical Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 job, and driving to the hamfest in the next city or county, you want the 'fest to be Saturday and Sunday, but if you're traveling to a tourist attraction for a big annual vacation, adding Friday is No Big Deal at the worst. Most families would put up with either going to the 'fest on Friday with you, or certainly won't mind if you go. The reality of going on Fridays is that if Orlando's crowd is both the local folks and the tourists, Friday would have smaller crowds than the weekend yet could be busy all three days. Based on going Fridays the most over the last few years, that seems to be the case.
So now what? Are there big hamfests near, say, the original Disneyland? Any other place where there's a big tourist draw that the radio clubs could conceivably tap into? That seems like the most important consideration.
That also plays into your positive feedback loop, which I honestly think is a factor. The general aging of the population (not just ham population, but the total) is a factor as well.
I never thought about piggybacking on nearby tourist draws. I wonder how much of a factor it is. How many states have anything like Disneyland or Disney World? (Neither of those are draws for me.) drjim would be the guy who'd know about CA hamfests. But if they had anything "big" near Anaheim, on the scale of Hamcation, I think we'd have heard about it.
Delete- jed
My astronomy club is mostly greybeards, kind of sad. Maybe three people under 30, one under 20. Yet kids are the most enthusiastic at the outreach parties. Sad.
ReplyDeleteThe last time I went to the nearest astronomy club was probably around the turn of the century - this century, that is. The makeup of the club was like you say: mostly oldsters and a handful under 30. And I have to say it was long enough ago that I didn't consider myself one of the oldsters.
DeleteThe "big" Hamfest here is in January. I usually go for a couple of hours to see if there's anything I need, and catch up with the locals.
ReplyDeleteUsed to be, the DRC hamfest was the "big" one. Yeah, that was true some years back. I wouldn't call any of them "big" these days. Absent unforeseen developments, I guess I'll see you in January.
Delete- jed
Is DRC the Denver Radio Club? It's pretty much the only answer I got on Duck Duck Go search engine.
DeleteYeah, that's it. They put on a good fest, pre-Covid. But realistically, the decline in hamfests had already started by then. The other "big" one, in Monument, didn't happen this year as well. So drjim is right, that the NCARC Winter Hamfest is the biggest of what's left.
Delete- jed