Dayton Roundup

Well, Dayton/Xenia 2024 has come and gone – always a good time at the dinners, this year attending the Flex Banquet and see the announcement of the Flex 8000 series radios, and the Contest Dinner hearing how K3LR got into radio and getting to where he is now. Hitting FDIM was a nice change of pace with some great presenters – I hadn’t paid much attention to Elecraft’s product line, so this was the first I was hearing of the KH1, and am very impressed – when I finally have my CW to a usable point, I fully plan on adding one of those to the collection. At this event, QRP labs also announced the QMX+, which I picked up on Friday morning at the Hamfest. At their Homebrew Night, it was neat to see all of the assorted homemade projects that are either on the air, or in the process of getting running – to go with that (and another toy I grabbed on the way out on Sunday I’ll touch on in a minute) I picked up one of the 4 State QRP 4S-Key, this should be real handy during the VHF contest.

Friday and Saturday were a lot of wandering – Friday was a bit of a rainy day for the first couple of hours, so I stuck to the buildings for a bit; before hitting many of the vendors though, about an hour after getting in the gate after meeting up with a friend I made a pretty quick run over to Tarheel Antennas. I’ve been trying to get my hands on an LT-II for about two years now and figured I’d try and go right to the source. He’d apparently blown through a lot of inventory in the first hour after the doors opened, but I was able to get the 2nd to last one he had. Once the rain subsided I ventured out to the flea market to wander around until we had to head out for the Flex Dinner. It was at the dinner that we heard from one of the researchers trying to find Amelia Earhart’s plane, and saw the announcement of the Flex 8000 series radios. I also won a cover for a flex 6400… a radio I don’t have, but it’s a nice leather cover that should actually work nice on my Kenwood TS-830.

Saturday the weather was nice from moment one, so I decided to tackle the flea market as soon as we got in the door and grabbed a coffee. While I didn’t buy anything early on, I did wind up dodging the sun a bit and heading in to one of the buildings to find Batteries America and pick up a (very) large capacity battery for my Yaesu FT-5. I’d been using it all weekend to beacon APRS while walking around, and while it’d just barely get through the day, I wanted something that’d have a longer life. Fun fact, they make a 3800mah battery for it, which is almost double to original capacity; it makes it a brick to carry, but it was still kicking after over 12 hours of beaconing on Sunday. We attended the contest dinner on Saturday night seeing K3LR speak about how he got to where he is, and sitting at the grand prize raffle winner’s table – fun fact, he won the grand prize last year as well.

Sunday before heading out, I was him-hawing around trying to decide if I wanted to pull the trigger on a new radio – there were a few retailers that were offering certain amounts off over a certain dollar value, and my grandfather had also won a DX Engineering gift certificate he likely wasn’t going to use the night before, so he gave that to me just in case. I’d decided that if anybody had an IC-705 in stock and I could take it home with me that day I’d buy one. HRO had run out on Saturday, it DX Engineering actually brought inventory with them, something I don’t believe that they normally do, and they had them in stock, so I wound up purchasing one!

All in all it was as good as always, and I have plenty of photos coming – I’d decided to use my good camera this year for this trip as Cell Phone images are always lacking, even with the Pro/Ultra level phones, so I need to dump the camera’s memory card, but here are a few images to get you started!

Side note with this, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked why my YouTube Channel is so many times, one guy even suggested I start one when he found out I didn’t have one (sorry dude, I don’t like the sound of my voice, and hate editing myself).

As always, looking forward to next year!