For those in Southern California, the legendary W6TRW swap meet is up and running again. As always, last Saturday of the month, 7am until 11:30am. It’s in Redondo Beach. Brilliant nerdy stuff from every decade from the 40’s to the present. A fair amount of tacky stuff, but a lot of hidden gems also.
"New hours are from 7:00AM until 12:00 Noon" seems like a really poor choice of time. I know plenty of people who are into electronics who'd be more likely to show up if this was from midnight to 5 am (not suggesting that that would be a good time, just that this time seems absurd when you're targeting geeks and maybe extending it into the afternoon would be a good idea).
I have no experience with this event, but it's sort of common in amateur radio communities that events are scheduled around typical retiree hours (think "early bird special"). It can make it difficult for younger working people to attend, and given the legendary cliquishness of some of those communities it may be intentional. Again I know nothing about this specific event or the organizers so I'm not pointing fingers.
Very fond memories of the Foothill College Swap Meet.
With that and Weird Stuff Warehouse, I was able to put together a complete TRS-80 Color Computer rig in a matter of hours. The cassette recorder cable was a particularly nice find.
Most electronics are pretty useless without documentation/datasheets.
Some components might be self-explanatory from their inscriptions, like capacitors or resistors, but with undocumented semiconductors its instant game-over. Worst case are ASICs in epoxy resin...
I haven’t been to this flea in about 5 years, but this is a flea run by a ham club, not like some mysterious unlabeled chips in a shenzhen alley. Plenty of old (10 years) computers, some very old (40 years) computers, radios (vintage AM receivers), radios (amateur radio), loose tubes of common varieties, test equipment, military surplus, misc cheap junk (bad bicycle lights), guitar amps, and a few electronics components (most commonly higher power LEDs on boards IIRC)
These types of meetings are more targeted towards electronics whose primary functions aren't governed by software- think like an oscilloscope that runs directly off of a series of chips instead of modern ones composed of an fully virtual stack on top of an operating system. So long as said components fall within reasonable specs (analog is typically much more forgiving than digital) and chips replaced with facsimiles these units can have a second life.
This problem is not specific to software-related items. You can't really use an transistor if you don't know its polarity, pin out, amplification curves and current limits...
Sadly, it got less amazing as the decades marched on and Silicon Valley became Web Valley (now Social Valley?).
Those days: Computer Literacy bookstore, Disk Drive Depot... Fry's went mainstream and then faded, Weirdstuff gone, Haltek, several other surplus stores gone whose names escape me. The Saturday crawl from one surplus store to another across Mountain View and Sunnyvale used to be worth getting up early for.
As good a thread as any in which to post this, anyone else with a basement full of electronics parts interested in federating a web store for one-offs and interesting finds?
I have acquired plenty of cool stuff, but nothing in significant enough quantities to make it as an electronics supplier. I'm thinking more curated antique store vibe.
I don't know about these days, but back in the 1980s there were a number of electronics surplus stores located on Canal St, below SoHo. I used to pop in now and then to buy stuff. They were part of a larger ecosystem of industrial supply stores left over from the days when SoHo was a factory district. Sadly, the last time I was down there no electronics stores remained.
There used to be some sort of frequent "Expo" - which was more of a flea market to me - that took place in Secaucus, NJ...and i bought plenty of components and a PC computer or two there back in the early 2000s. Nowadays, i just assume there isn't anything like that and just look for stuff on ebay, craigslist, used/refurbished sections of newegg, amazon, etc.
This is great! I have a garage full of old gear that I don’t want to put in the landfill but it is still worth a few dollars. Wish I had heard of this earlier this week to make it.
