It was great to attend the first Ham Radio meeting at Friedrichshafen since before the pandemic. There were fewer commercial sellers there than normal, partly due to the increasingly extortionate pricing of stalls but also due to the global shipping backlogs a number simply have no gear to sell. The flea market was smaller than before with only 1.5 halls full of sellers, down from 2 full halls before the pandemic and nearly 3 full halls when the event first moved to the Neue Messe around 20 years ago. For obvious reasons there were fewer Ukrainian sellers and no Russian sellers that I saw this year, though there were plenty of sellers with old Russian/Warsaw Pact components and a lovely 10kva high voltage transformer that sadly I had to leave because I can’t imagine that Lufthansa would have welcomed it at the check-in desk. It conformed to The Law of Plate Transformers: if you can lift it, then it’s it big enough. I noticed quite a few 8877s or 3CPX1500A7s at prices far below what they would have fetched until recently, though someone wanting €850 for a used YC156 - that’s taking the proverbial. Maybe the era of tube amplifiers up to 1.5-2kW is now over and demand has dropped? There were some nice 1kW solid state amps for 6m and others for 2m around the €500-600 mark Still, I got my fix of junk and components for projects, met up with old friends, sadly reminisced about a few who have departed since the last Friedrichshafen, enjoyed some good presentations and lectures and had a few beers. Ok, more than a few beers. Far, far more than a few… Long live our network of international friendship. Till the next time in 2023.
