You actually let some of those Hobos in your house? Did you have to fumigate afterwards? 
A fumigation tale for you as promised Med ...
Several years ago a ham friend, call him person A, had an HF transceiver that was loaned to him that stopped working properly. Another friend who fixes PCs was going to his house to get A's computer which was broken. I asked to go along to get the rig loaned to him - a Yaesu HF rig (FT-757) - that I was going to troubleshoot. The man and his wife were heavy smokers and, while they didn't smoke when we were there, the house reaked of nicotine. I could barely breath by the time I left and my clothes smelled.
We got to my house and I grabbed the radio from the front seat. We went to the truck bed and looked at the PC in horror, mainly because of its filthy condition. When I got home I just sat the rig on my bench because I wanted to take a cat nap. After the nap, I wanted to take a quick look-see inside it, to see maybe if a wire was loose causing the rig to malfunction. Yes folks, even doing that is too much for some of these people to do themselves. So I opened up the top cover. It really smelled bad and all the components were sticky from cig smoke.
NOTICE - if you want to stop reading, now is the time. What I'm about to write still creeps me out.
When I took off the cover I thought I saw something move. Then something else ... a cockroach, then another, and another! I picked up the radio and ran outside to my patio where I sat it on the ground. I called the guy who I went with and quickly told him, but he said he had already had the same thing happen with the computer! I caught Person A talking on the local repeater and told him I was going to be calling on the phone ASAP. I gave him a long and scathing dissertation.
I put the rig in a shed next door to me (the house and shed were empty at the time). I set off a bug fumigator and closed the shed door and left it there all afternoon (see attached pic from my archives). I brought the radio back to my patio and took off the bottom cover. I brushed out as many dead insects as I could. I got alcohol and wiped down as much of the wiring as I could. I really didn't want to touch anything and I didn't want any of my test leads to touch anything in there like it was. The radio never made it back inside.
This radio was loaned to person A from his ham friend - person B. I told B about the situation, and he told me to just forget about the radio. Just put it in a bag and he'd come and get it. This person B was also loaning person A another radio of his. B went over to A's house and retrieved his equipment. He also told me he gave him a long and hard talk about the bug problem and what should be done about it. Roaches were in the radio probably because it gets warm and cozy. That's in the ham shack room. But then we think about the kitchen ... no let's not (too late).
But it wasn't over ...
I wondered how many roaches had escaped into my house when that radio was sitting on my bench for an hour. They appeared to be German roaches. A couple days later I was watching TV and a roach like the kind in the radio was on the arm of my chair. I've never had those kind of bugs, just the occasional big one that creeps in from the garage. For the next month I had to do mitigating controls to make sure I didn't get an infestation. I was furious at the guy.
Of course not all hams are like that, but at least one is.
Wow, that's quite the story.
I always heard that hamfests are where you go to get the good stuff cheap so when I decided to start building a proper workshop at home beyond a written off scope that one of the managers at work authorized for me and a couple of mediocre Canadian Tire DMMs, I went to a couple of hamfests. The first one I went to with a college electronics professor who was getting ready to retire and rented a table to try and unload some of his excess stuff. He tried to prepare me for it with horror stories about ham radio operators including how filthy some of them are and how militant some of them are but it wasn't adequate to cover the freak show going on there. There was also very little good equipment for sale. It was all destroyed filthy junk that might not even be worth anything to one of those places that buys scrap metal.
I picked up a nice HP signal generator from one of the local surplus shops that rented a table and some nice Hammerlund boat anchor gear from an elderly gent that I've seen at two of the three hamfests I went to. He's the sort of person I'd love to spend some quality time with hearing stories and learning new things from. I mentioned that I was surprised the HP signal generator didn't sell right away to the guy from the surplus shop and he told me that nothing good ever sells at the hamfests and went on a bit of a mini-rant about that. This was still in the morning but as the day went by, I began to understand better why.
Anyways, I found a spectrum analyzer locally from someone who occasionally flips surplus test equipment and I thought it was reasonably priced so I didn't negotiate on it. When I went to pick it up, we talked and he cringed when I mentioned the hamfest. We ended up talking about that and how ham radio ops always lowball on expensive, top end gear, the filth, the ARES nutcases, the militant nutcases etc. and a nickname ended up taking shape. "Ham radio assholes"
If, if, on the off chance I go to one of these things again, anything coming back home is getting opened up and checked out thoroughly on a table in the back yard before coming into the house. I've heard horror stories with old equipment being infested so no, just no chances being taken with that.
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Topic: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread (Read 18848241 times)