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I have always been a fan of the The Flea at MIT. A Cambridge institution, I can remember being introduced to it my Freshman year at college with the promise of cheap computer equipment. It did not disappoint and it instantly turned me into a die-hard flea market rat. I would arrive an hour before the gates open to get up in the front of the line. My arrival time, while inconvenient, would almost always pay off, by the time the gates open the lines would stretch down around the block. I would sometimes be starting my second loop around and still see people waiting in line to get in. I reveled in the smell of musty electronic equipment; haggling with vendors, rummaging through boxes, and lugging home backpacks full of electronic junk that would deck out my dorm room. It was a six story parking garage of nerdvana.

After moving down to New Bedford, the logistics of getting up to Cambridge became more complicated. That, coupled with the fact that I now had to store all my tech into a much smaller room, I only started to occasionally go to the flea. Yesterday, I drove up with Steve, KB1MEH, to my first flea of the year, and I was blown away at how small the flea had become. While the outside was filled with the usual vendors, and there were quite a few deals there, what was once a nearly-filled to capacity parking garage didn’t even have a complete floor filled. Steve informed me that it was a similar scene the month before when he went.

On the ride home, I thought to myself about the proclamations of “Ham Radio is dying!” and the subset of that “Hamfests are dying!“, and wondering how the applied to the Flea. While the Flea can be classified as a “Hamfest” and you can often find radios for sale, the amount of computer gear outnumbered the amount of radio gear easily 4:1. What did this mean?

After some thought I came to a conclusion: What we are seeing is the mainstreaming of computer gear that occured in the early 2000s. Computers are now a consumer technology and the vast majority of consumers are likely to toss them out at the end of life. Since older technology has a very limited life-span, the glut “vintage” technology for sale in the late-1990s and early-2000s are now completely worthless and are likely to join their older counterparts in the recycling center or dump. What doesn’t will likely make their way to eBay or Craigslist rather then flea market as it is a lot easier to post an ad online rather then set up shop at a flea market that smells of BO and musty electronics.

I think we may be seeing the same thing on the Hamfest side. With the more non-user-serviceable nature of new radios, when they break, it can be often cheaper to replace them rather then fix them. Since this is leading to a shorter life-span of radios and the conveience factor of online marketplaces, we will likely see flea markets, tech or otherwise, continue to shrink.

I am very happy that I nabbed some cheap ceramic insulators and some more connectors for my budding projects, though.