Timonium Hamfest 2k8...

So today bsom, myself, and two of our student workers woke up at the ass-crack of dawn and headed out to the Greater Baltimore Hamboree.

Usually, I sell at hamfests - I have enough deeply discounted stuff I've bought on sale, at auctions, at yard sales, or have hanging around the house that I don't use anymore that I can usually sell for a profit. I don't make a whole lot, but it's a few hundred bucks and gets rid of stuff that's too big or not worth enough to eBay.

But when it comes to Timonium, I go to buy rather than sell. There are a lot more vendors there, and a lot of them are ones who don't sell at other 'fests. Timonium is also expensive to sell at, and often a target for the sales tax authority.

I brought about $450 with me - and spent a large chunk of it, mostly on stuff that's going on eBay. So what did MadAnthony buy?

hamfest haul - cat not included

- a Mitrac ruggedized laptop $25- I'm keeping this. This thing is stupidly large, heavy, and bulletproof. It's designed to survive things like military combat or police work. It's not exactly a powerhouse - Celeron 400mhz, 64mb RAM, 10 gig hard drive, windows 98 SE - but it's in good shape for a ruggedized, missing only one of the port covers where the power supply plugs in. It also has a cd-rom, floppy, and pcmcia slots, which is unusual for a ruggedized.

- NeoGeo Gold system - $225 - this is a vintage video game system from the early '90's. It was a commercial failure but has a loyal following among collectors. The one I bought is in awesome shape, with box - one of the controllers is still wrapped, it's a low serial number, and includes an extra memory card. Similar ones on eBay seem to go for $350 to $400, plus $25 for the extra memory card. bsom cued me in to the value of this puppy.

- fish finder - $45 - an eBay item. Last year, I bought one for $10 at a yard sale and eBayed it for $100, so I keep my eyes open for these. Bsom found this one. It looks like it goes for about $65 on eBay, so it won't make me rich, but it's a few bucks.

- Apple Powerbook G3 233 -$25- missing hard drive and power supply, but incredibly clean. Am going to try to get it fixed and eBay it.

- HP toner cartridge for lj 1200 - $12 - goes for about $30 on eBay

- Motorola fractional T1 modem and Multitech proxy server - $5 each. I've had good luck with other motorola and multitech items on eBay from the Record and Tape Traders auction. Unfortunatly, it looks like the multitech is worthless and the Motorola is worth maybe $10 - but that's the risk of ham, and I haven't lost much

- Toshiba external CDROM - $5 - for the portege and other toshiba laptops. I don't have one now, but they come in handy, so for $5 I figured it would be good if I ever get another Portege.

bsom bought a bunch of stuff, including an embedded touchscreen PC (which I would have bought if he hadn't), two radio shack pro scanners (which he will mod and ebay), a Panasonic Toughbook p3, and probably some other stuff I forgot about. One of the students picked up a toughbook p3, an iPaq, an HP Jornada, a Silicon Graphics Personal Iris workstation (for $2!), an external DVD drive, and a pile of video cards. The other student bought a dvd player, a super nintendo, and - possibly the most classic purchase ever - a cigarette lighter shaped like a penis.

Biggest miss of the day - a guy sold two G4 cubes for $5 to some guy who was in front of one of our students - they go for $100+ on eBay. What sucked is we had been by the vendor earlier, before he had them out.

Still, I should make a little money flipping this stuff on eBay, and maybe will do something cool with the ruggedized laptop. But I'm looking forward to the next hamfest (probably memorial day) that I can sell at, since I have a ton of inventory to move - and an empty wallet, thanks to all the buying I did today.