Electronics Flea Market
electronicsfleamarket.com
electronicsfleamarket.com
The most important information:
The Electronics Flea Market tentatively resumes on March 10, 2024. The planned location (directions) is parking lot 3 at West Valley College in Saratoga:
West Valley College 14000 Fruitvale Ave Saratoga, California 95070
The hours are from 6:00AM until 12:00 Noon.
https://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/
https://phys.org/news/2016-09-mit-flea-specializes-rare-obsc...
20 years from now, I expect to be the one with a booth there trying to sell all the test equipment that I’ve gathered over years.
wow, California has thought of everything!
> For example, a person who is disposing of unwanted household items, and does this no more than twice in any twelve-month period, is generally considered to be an occasional seller
Sounds unfortunate if your unwanted stuff is illiquid, but I guess there's some wiggle room if the official form phrases it that way
Electronics Flea Market - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965183 - April 2022 (38 comments)
Unfortunately, I'm 2000+ miles East of there.
It’s also a great way to reunite with coworkers from times past, although I have really a bad memory for faces.
When I told him about the 5334A purchase, he replied “Oh yeah, I was the project lead for that one.”
You can see the loot here: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2023/06/16/Frequency-Counting-.... I bought another HP counter today in Monterey… It’s like bicycles: the perfect amount to own is +1.
I think that makes me a qualified Quantum Mechanic. ;-)
The Cesium beam clock actually has a stream of atoms flowing through it, which is finite, leading to tube lifetimes of a decade or less.
The rubidium clock has a number of cells of rubidium gas, one of which is a light source, the other of which gets hit with RF, and if the frequency is just right, it absorbes about 1% of the light before it hits the detector.
A much smaller physics package, to be sure. They do drift, though, a tiny bit.
I enjoy browsing thrift stores and pawn shops because you never know what you'll find there, and it's all dirt cheap.
Good finds are rare, but if you check it every day, you’ll find some good stuff eventually.
Open space, quiet, people leave me alone, I can pursue side projects because the cost of living is so low.
EXCEPT for things like this. This type of thing makes me yearn for the coast.
I hit the Electronics Flea Market only a few times because, back then, I was not a morning person. I remember showing up at 7:00 AM or so once when the dark was just lifting and seeing people leaving with their small wire rolling carts filled with electronics. I imagined that all the good stuff got scooped up at 6:00.
More often though I would do the "Saturday crawl" to all the surplus electronics stores — when there were a lot of surplus electronics stores. Sadly over the decades I saw them all but disappear entirely.
It's probably just as well I am back in the midwest though. I'm already too much of a hoarder.
Which is annoying, because back in the 90s you had hell to pay to get anything to work with a computer (usually abusing the parallel port); now any Raspberry Pi can easily control random doodads you might find, but there's no place to find them.