Scanning the Airwaves

Last Friday and Saturday, I attended my first ever hamfest. NEAR-Fest stands for New England Amateur Radio Festival and is a hamfest that has been occurring every May and October at the Deerfield Fairgrounds since 2007. It was spawned from the ashes of a similar hamfest, The Hosstraders Tailgate Swapfest which had it's last event in October 2006. At our September meeting of the North Shore Radio Association , it was brought up that NEAR-Fest was just under a month and that something should be organized to sell off some of the silent key stash we had (including me with three boxes of books). At the end of September, on our usual Sunday night net, I called in via EchoLink to see if I could round up some help. Then a few days later, at the start of October, I posted on our Yahoo Groups mailing list to see if I could enlist some more help. In the end, the club treasurer, Eric, KA1NCF, a ham friend of his who lives down the street from him, Joel, N1KTH and myself went to ...

Back in January, I posted about silent key ham W1OCY and his trove of old ham radio items plus other odds and ends that went undiscovered for 8-9 years in a warehouse in Peabody, Massachusetts. I missed out on our club's February meeting due to work commitments, but got an update at our club's March meeting. At the time, we hadn't sold anything, but now I can report, that we've sold a lot of stuff and made a nice profit for the club, which is important because we just installed a UHF DMR repeater through the  New England Digital Emergency Communications Network (NEDECN). We're still not done, I have still have some of the books in storage as do others. If you need more information or are just interested, email me here.

W1OCY, Everett E. Chapman, is a silent key. He died in 2010 , just two days shy of the new year at the age of 85. He was born on April 30, 1925 in Glen Cove, NY and grew up in Vermont and New Hampshire. He served his country in the United States Navy during World War II and was part of the  V-12 Navy College Training Program at Dartmouth College. He was at least an Ensign based on items we found in this "treasure." I don't know if he reached any higher ranks, I've tried searching through US Navy Registers online and so far, I haven't found anything. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1948 with an A.B. and entered the business world in 1955 working for Dynatrol and other places in the aerospace industry such as Raytheon based on his collection of papers we found. He didn't have much family, didn't marry, at least from what I can tell and obviously no kids. He was survived by brother Donald, who is still alive and will turn 90 on April Fools' Day t...