Yep, we got Ham Nation's Don Wilbanks AE5DW to conduct an interview (with Emmit from RadioWavez) on HamRadioNow. Don't tell Bob Heil! The rest of the show is me and Chicken With Fries just walking around pointing our cameras and microphones at people and things.
A terrible site and ill-thought out parking. The Wright State Nutter Center would have been the ideal choice. A little help from the local leadership would have benefited all concerned.
We arrived about 6:40 AM on Friday and Saturday for our flea market spots. Got right in on both days but had to sit around for about fifteen minutes on Friday because the horse people were supposed to get off the track at 6 AM and refused to. Supposedly they also changed the gate padlocks and they had to be cut off. While the traffic on the roads was backed up an hour or more on Friday, it looked like they had that figured out by Saturday. I saw no backups on the entry road on Saturday at all. We skipped Sunday because of all the rain. All in all, mud aside, had I not known this was their first year there I would have never suspected it. Some hay or straw laid down on the walking areas in the flea market area would have gone a long way to keeping the mud mess down. One of the workers told me they had run "drills" and practice runs for the previous three months to help make sure things went well. They succeeded far better than I would have imagined. It definitely is physically smaller than Hara despite the statements saying it was within a tenth of an acre. I walked up each aisle on one side and down the other side at Hara a few times and it was just over four miles with my GPS app. At Greene it was only 2.3 miles and that included walking from the track area to the overflow area. Still, perhaps their 11 acre math was just for the occupied slots at Hara. My guess was there were about 1,300 spots and the ones at Greene were much larger. Our group had one less spot than we had at Hara and we still had more space than in previous years. I managed to get 20,000 steps in each day, the same as at Hara. I think it all worked out because I could get to each spot more times than at Hara. Oh, for the good old days at Hara when every slot was occupied, there was a waiting list and they were towing cars out if they were just being used for parking. <sigh> Ray
I've heard many hams say the Nutter Center would be a potential location. I 'ain' t from around here,' so I might be missing something. If so, enlighten me. The Nutter Center is a big basketball (etc.) areana, surrounded by a big parking lot. It has one conference room (the Berry Room), and no other convention style facilities that I could find. So it would accommodate essentially the Arena part of the Hamvention, the flea market in the parking lot, and some of the forums in the Berry room. The arena seating is 11,000, bigger than Hara's, but that seating isn't very useful to the hamfest. Missing would be all the other vendor booth space in the 3 other large halls at Hara. That would seem to be a dealbreaker. So again, what am I missing?
I would suspect DARA checked out all available sites and went with the best fit - based on Gary's run-down of Nutter Center, it doesn't sound like it would have been nearly as good of a fit for this event as the fairgrounds was. Sounds like a smart move based on this and other info I've heard.
The jury is still out but I will be going again next year. On a positive note, the food vendors were fantastic. Hamvention lunch has never been as good! The home made Ice Cream vendor was a hit, as was the grilled round steak sandwiches, the Burbon chicken, Real pork chops! and hamburgers that didn't in any way resemble hockey pucks. I think the vendors who had tents and the indoor space was done well. Getting into the event in the morning needs some better strategy and planning. Hey it was Hamvention Xenia version 0.9b. I think next year will be better. Oh one more item. The outdoor flea market area needs more hay, like maybe 1,000 more bales.
