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The Northland Antique Radio Club
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Mark Your Calendar!
May 17,18, 2013 - Northland Antique Radio Club: Radio Daze 2013 September 2013 - Northland Antique Radio Club: Annual Meeting and Mini-Swap meet See Calendar of Events for details of NARC's upcoming and past events. |
Radio Daze 2013, the Upper Midwest's ultimate vintage radio collecting event, will be held Friday and Saturday, May 17-18, 2013, at the Comfort Inn of Plymouth, located at the northwest corner of I-494 and Hwy. 55 in Plymouth, Minnesota. This will be our 16th year at this great location! Room rates are still only $73.00 (plus tax) per night for either a single or a double room. The Comfort Inn's reservation phone number is (763) 559-1222. This is NARC's premier event, and we are proud to have both the the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting and the Antique Wireless Association (AWA) as supporting sponsors. The auction, swap meet, radio contest, program, and awards presentation are well attended by prominent vintage radio collectors from across the country. The radio contest includes equipment displayed from the earliest days of radio to the 1960's. Brochures will be mailed in early April to all known radio collectors in the five state area. The meet kicks off with a large antique radio auction in the hotel main ballroom at 7:00 p.m. Friday May 17! We make this an entertaining auction and there will be a good variety of radios available. If you want to sell your radio(s) at the auction, check them in between 3:00 and 6:00 pm Friday. Auction preview is 6:00 to 7:00 pm, and the auction starts at 7:00 pm. Auction details are in the brochure. A visit to the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting is always a highlight of 'Radio Daze' and they schedule their annual garage sale of surplus radio relics for this weekend. The Pavek museum is located at 3517 Raleigh Avenue in St. Louis Park, Minnesota and will be open at 10:00 am sharp on both Friday and Saturday. Make sure you are displaying your Radio Daze name tag for free admission. Saturday begins with the hotel parking lot swap meet in the morning. (Please note that the permit from the City of Plymouth does not allow any parking lot sales prior to Saturday morning.) The hospitality room will be open at 7:00 am with hot coffee and rolls. A light lunch will be available 11:00 am to 1:00 pm. The registration room opens at 8:00 am. Item check in for the old radio contest will run from 11:00 am to noon, with viewing from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm. The contest has some new categories as described in the Radio Daze 2013 brochure. A trip to the contest room always yields a surprise or two! For Saturday lunch, NARC will offer a light lunch in the hospitality room, or a great meal can be had at Lucky's 13 Pub within the hotel. Several other restaurants are nearby, including Perkins, Jake's Sports Bar, and some fast food establishments. The Saturday program begins at 2:00 pm and includes opening comments, contest awards, door prizes, and a featured speaker. This year's speaker will be Jim Ramsburg, an expert on the Golden Age of Network Radio broadcasting. You won't want to miss this presentation! Click here ( 2001 / 2002 / 2004 / 2005 / 2007 / 2012) to see photos from previous years! Registration is required for admittance to all indoor events, the Hospitality Room, the Pavek Museum, and to sell items in the parking lot. Registration is encouraged, but not required, for anyone just attending the auction or buying at the swap meet. You can pre-register (and save $3.00) by returning a registration form before May 10th. After you arrive, please pick up your name badge and other materials in the Registration Room. |
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WORKSHOP AND OUTDOOR MINI-SWAP MEET Sunday February 17, 2013 Museum of Broadcasting 3517 Raleigh Avenue, St. Louis Park, Minnesota
The Northland Antique Radio Club's annual Radio Workshop will be held February 17 at the The Museum of Broadcasting, located at 3517 Raleigh Avenue, St. Louis Park, Minnesota 55416. This is a favorite event for many NARC members and is always very enjoyable. The day begins with the swap meet outside in the parking lot. The swap always has some interesting radios and other radio things for sale at reasonable prices. The museum will open its doors at 11 a.m., an hour before the workshop begins. This hour is a great time to explore the museum, check out what surplus items might be for sale in the back room, visit with fellow collectors, and munch on the snacks that Kim and Lynn Wagar will be bringing. But please, no snacks in the museum main room! The workshop starts at noon and will probably last about 2 hours. This promises to be another good workshop! Bill Schmitt will share his feedback modifications for early radios. Matt Hyman will show us how he has been able to restore damaged grill cloth. Then we'll use Allen Lein's curve tracer to match output and driver tubes on a classic Williamson amplifier while comparing "before and after" distortion figures with an HP distortion analyzer. Admission is free to all current Museum of Broadcasting and NARC members (and immediate family members). Membership forms will be available for anyone wishing to join the club. See you there! |
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Saturday November 3, 2012 St. Croix Lutheran High School 1200 Oakdale Avenue, West St. Paul, Minnesota It was another great swap meet at St. Croix Luther High School! The year's second largest event was held November 3rd, a chilly day, but it didn't cool our enthusiasm for selling radios and mingling with our NARC friends. | |
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Saturday November 3, 2012 (Open to the public 8:30 am to 1:00 pm) St. Croix Lutheran High School 1200 Oakdale Avenue, West St. Paul, Minnesota Fall is finally upon us. Flea markets and garage sales are done for the year. It's time for the Northland Antique Radio Club annual fall radio swap meet! Doors open at 8:00 AM for sellers to register, unload, bring in their wares, and set up. Tables are $10 and are provided by the school. Due to the limited number of tables available you must be a paid NARC member to set up and sell. Only those setting up to sell will be admitted at 8:00 AM. Note: Sellers will have to carry their items a short distance to the swap meet area, so bring a hand truck or small cart if you have anything heavy. The school requests that you please use extra care not to mark the floors with your hand cart and please bring a protective covering for the table. At 8:30 AM, shoppers will be allowed into the selling area. You can expect to find typically about 35 -40 tables full (plus overflow onto the floor) of radios, literature, tubes, parts and other related items. Admission is FREE for NARC members and only a buck for nonmembers. Mary Farmer will be in charge of table rentals, admissions and membership renewals. The Wagars will have free coffee and snacks set up in the morning, and Mary will offer a light lunch later in the morning, usually hot dogs, cookies, bags of chips and pop for three bucks. Silent auction rules are the same as last year. Silent auction items will be accepted for display from 9:00 am until noon, with the auction closing promptly at noon. The club provides auction forms and assesses no fees. All sales are final. All settlements for items purchased through the auction are to take place directly between the buyer and seller. All items up for bid are being sold "as is". Sellers can establish a minimum bid and types of payment accepted (cash, check, trades) for successful bids. High bidders and owners MUST stay until the auction closes to complete their transactions. NARC is simply providing the means for the auction and assumes no responsibility for seller or buyer actions. We have the room until 1:00 pm and expect the meet will probably start winding down around noon, giving sellers an hour to pack up. This is a great chance to liquidate radios you no longer want, and to mingle with fellow club members. See you there! |
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& SWAP MEET The Northland Antique Radio Club will be holding its 2012 annual meeting and election of officers at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting in St. Louis Park at noon on Sunday September 23, 2012. All NARC members are invited to attend. The current officers have all agreed to run again. The term of office will be October 1, 2012 to September 30, 2013. Running for office are: Steve Raymer as NARC president, Glen Berg and Al Jesperson as Vice Presidents, Greg Farmer as Secretary and Mary Farmer as Treasurer. Like in past years, the meeting will be preceded by an old radio swap meet outside in the museum parking lot. The actual meeting starts at 12:00 noon inside the museum with Steve Raymer providing the president's view on how things went over the last year. Greg Farmer will give a brief financial report and announce election results, and Jim Thompson will recap of how the event went in May. We've decided to carry over a familiar Annual Meeting tradition: 'Finds of the Summer'. NARC members are encouraged to bring in and show new additions to their collections that they acquired over the summer. It's always interesting and fun to see what other radio club members lucked upon at garage sales, flea markets, estate sales or swap meets. Remember this event is FREE for all current and renewing members. Also, don't forget to come a little early to check out the outdoor swap meet in the museum's parking lot! It usually is going strong by 10am and winds down by 11 or 11:30. It's free to sell and there are always some good deals available. |
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By 6:00 p.m. Friday evening May 20th, radios and related items were filling up the auction room. We were in for a busy evening, kicking off NARC's 25TH annual Radio Daze event with a huge auction! The room was filled with consoles, wood and bakelite table radios, boxes of tubes, paper and everything else imaginable. There were even some big Scott radios, like last year. At 7:00 p.m., NARC's new auctioneer, Frank Rasada, started selling. He had lots of help this year; Jim Thompson, Matt Hyman, Glen Berg, Bill Linder, Kip Wallace, and Bill Fanum held items up for the audience to bid on, or were spotters. There wasn't an empty seat in the house. Some items went for the minimum bid of $10, while others went for pretty good money. Only 32 of the 219 items didn't sell, either because they couldn't get the minimum bid or because they had a reserve price that wasn't met. The items were of very good quality this year. Some of the better items included a Scott All-Wave 23, a Scott Phantom, a 16-tube Scott, and an Atwater Kent 82 grandfather clock radio. There were also some nice cathedral radios including a nice Atwater Kent 84, a Marconi, and some Philcos. The better battery sets were a Radiola V, Grebe CR-9, a Federal 57, Radiola 26 and a Neutrowound. Some very nice Zenith Transoceanic radios, various advertising signs, and many other items were also sold. Frank did a great job all night, and his energy never wavered. Mary's color-coded tags were used again to evenly distribute each seller's items throughout the auction, making it more fair so no seller had all their items sell late when the crowd was thinning out. The reserve price system was different and worked better than last year, but will be tweaked again next year so bidders won't know the reserve beforehand. This year's auction was bigger and as good as last year. Frank was the front man, but he had a lot of help. Mary Farmer, Kim and Lynn Wagar, and Don Hauff managed the business end of the auction. They all pitched in to collect fees, get buyers, sellers and the auction items registered. They worked like a well-oiled machine and made everything run smoothly. Great job everyone! The next morning was overcast and it rained on and off all during the outdoor swap meet. The lot wasn't quite as full of sellers as last year, but still many good items quickly traded hands between the showers and we made the best of it. It became a more steady rain later in the morning and everyone moved inside where the hospitality room, manned by Lynn and Kim Wagar, Kip Wallace's mother Joy and her friend Theresa Jackson, got very busy. The contest had many great items entered again this year, including Bob Slagle's big 1930s Coca-Cola bottle radio which was awarded the Best of Show trophy, Kip Wallace's 1931 and 1932 British McMichael radios, Matt Hyman's matched pair of McIntosh MC-30 amplifiers, and many more. The program included the presentation of the Best of Show and People's Choice contest awards, an interesting in-depth presentation by Don Patterson about the history of Grebe and also about another of his favorite 1920s radio inventors, David Grimes. The program ended with our usual abundance of door prizes, thanks to the Kip Wallace family. Thank you all for coming, and a special thanks to everyone who helped! |
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NARC MEMBERS!
Check out NARC's online list of members having email addresses or websites. This list now contains about 70 members and their interests! |
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The Northland Antique Radio Club