IARCHS Meeting March 31, 2018 Davenport

WHEN: Saturday March 31st

WHERE:  At the home of Jerry Rappel,  1415 West 34th Street, Davenport Iowa

To contact Jerry with any questions about getting there please TEXT him  at 563-370-8594Jerry is hearing impaired and has difficulty speaking on the phone, OR you can email him at ww0e@q.com

TIME: 10 AM until ??  (lunch will be provided by the club)

WHAT TO BRING: Your repair projects for the usual after the business meeting project help / learning session, and your enthusiasm!   ALSO,  If you are an experienced restorer and have a favorite / unusual piece of test gear, please bring it along.  Jerry is a more recent member and he tells me he has he space and desire but limited test equipment; he does have a tube tester, I will be bringing a couple meters, a variac and a dim-bulb tester, so those won’t be needed.

IARCHS 2017 Auction Success

2017 IARCHS Radio Auction Cedar RapidsWe had another great auction this year with over 550 individual lots sold. The weather might have been dreary outside, but as this auction was inside the nice building at the west side of Hawkeye downs it was nice and cozy.  If you were there, see you again next year, if you weren’t, hope to see you next year. Great fun for all and just watching the Amazing Wears auction team in play is a show in its self.

DON’T FORGET BECOME AN IARCHS MEMBER! STILL FREE, just click on the Join IARCHS (free) menu selection. It’s located on every page.

NEW Date for the 2017 IARCHS Auction

2017 IARCHS Radio Auction Cedar Rapids

This years auction was moved up a week from our usual date. it will now be:

Saturday April 29, 2017 Hayracks at 9:30am, Auction at 10:00am
Auction Building at Hawkeye Downs, 4400 6th Street SW
Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Keep informed, register today and get those important information updates in your email box.  Plus registration gets you access to the current newsletter and the members forum as well.

November 5 IARCHS Meeting

Iowa Antique Radio Club & Historical Society

The next Iowa Antique Radio Club & Historical Society meeting is coming up in just one WEEK.  Check your dates and see if you can make it, we would love to see you there.

 Fall IARCHS Meeting; Nov 5th 2016

Tom Zenisek
1610 Litchfield Dr.
Hiawatha, IA 52233
(319) 362-1541
tomjonzee@aol.com

10AM Business meeting, repair session to follow. Let Tom know if you are coming.

Antique Radio Auction Web Pages

Antique Radio Auction Web PagesWe have just added the Antique Radio Auction Web Pages to our site. The 2016 Iowa Antique Radio Club Auction is coming up soon, May is not that far away, nor is our usual auction location of Cedar Rapids, IA.  This year we are planning to have better advance pictures of auction items on our website before the auction.  This way if someone is looking for a specific radio that is going to be sold at the auction, they will know to be sure and be there.  We also added several hundred pictures from the last three auctions.  This should bring back memories of the stuff you really wanted, but missed getting. You can find these pages listed on our club antique radio auction web pages.

The Future IARCHS website, what’s new?

Our Plans Short Term

We decided to change a few things on the IARCHS website because we wanted to use the website as a tool that the club could use to do a better job in a few specific areas.

  • Add website Support our annual Antique Radio Auction
    • Explain how the auction operates
    • Have a nice gallery of upcoming auction radios with descriptions
    • Add Previous auction highlights pictures
  • Improve our Iowa Radio Manufacturer listing pages
  • Be able to add pictures for each Iowa made radio when we can get them.
  • Add Early Commercial Iowa Radio Stations
  • Provide Guidance to folks with Orphaned Radio Estates
  • Radio-Collector.com domain name
  • Reduce membership paperwork-workload

Annual Radio Auction

Brett Wears does a fantastic job managing our radio auction, it is always a great time for all.  We need to do a better job getting the word out to other radio collectors. The more folks that know about our auction, the better attended it will be.  Better attendance should mean that more radios will show up at the auction, and that with more attendees, the a nice radio should expect an even better selling price.  We intend to get there by highlighting our past auctions with searchable radio pictures, and by having a better current pictures gallery.  Pictures need names and descriptions if we want the collector of that radio to know we will have one at our auction.  We can do this with our new website.

Iowa Radio Manufacturers

IARCHS-Collins Radio Company Cedar Rapids Iowa

This has always been a club asset on our website.  The new site has reformatted the existing list, splitting it into two parts, a list by Iowa city, and a list my radio maker.  This allows someone living in a city to look up radios, and also someone with a radio to look up to see if it was an Iowa radio. The new format will allow us to add actual pictures of these radios right into the ‘encyclopedia’ entry for it. If you have an Iowa radio, we would love to get a picture of it from you to put on the website. As a side benefit you will get website mention of you as the pic donor, you can always opt out if you don’t want the fame.

Early Commercial Iowa Radio Stations

There has been some interest in profiling early Iowa commercial radio stations. There have been many, and only a few have survived through the years.  We added a new feature to the website where we list the radio stations that existed, call sign, frequency, and in many cases the corporate owner.  We currently have the first 5 or 6 years on the website.  The future goal is to highlight individual stations, describing their history, call sign, frequency, and power changes through the years.  I am sure there are many interesting stories that can be shared surrounding these pioneer radio stations. FYI: at one point all the stations were on the same frequency, check it out.

Orphaned Radio Estates

What happens to his collection when an avid radio collector passes away? This collection becomes an Orphaned Radio Estate that needs to be adopted.  The adoption process is a difficult and extremely stressful process for most.  The antique radio community is at risk of losing those wonderful radios, in some cases even unique one of a kind pieces. As concerned IARCHS club members we would like to see a happy adoption outcome, even if it involves a group of adopters connecting at our annual auction. We want to use this website to help this adoption process be less stressful for the late collectors family members.  How that will be done we don’t know yet.  But, if we can connect with even one otherwise lost Orphaned radio estate that will be a good thing.

Radio-Collector.com

cropped-IARCHS-black-logo.pngWhy are we using http://www.radio-collector.com as our website name?  Actually it is just a second name, we will continue to use http://www.iowa-antique-radio-club.com as well.  We haven’t transferred the name to this site yet because the final approval for the move has yet to be given. At this time all of the data content from the old site is now on radio-collector.com, plus some new stuff as well.  To get better search engine exposure, this shorter more concise name is a great help. Having a second name allowed the new site to be built without degrading the existing one, which I thought was a good thing. When it is all done, our club website will have both names directed to it, and all will be good. This is not uncommon.

Refining Membership

Being a member in a group that shares your passion for collecting, repairing, or researching radios is a really great thing.  But with any organization there is the burden of administration, and making membership affordable.  We hope to use this website to manage the majority of club membership paperwork. This would be done by having online membership and annual dues collection done by the website.  The second concern occurs If we become famous and everyone wants copies of our stuff. This is a problem because of the large size of our technical library.  Some of our documents are 200 megabytes in size, we also previously referenced another site that had even more huge documents, they don’t exist anymore. I would say the huge data bandwidth those documents generated cost too much to support. For that reason we are going to limit access to those document to members willing to pay an annual $5 membership fee. We are working out the details on this, ideas and comments are welcome. Check out our membership page for more details.

Summary

We want to help the radio collector community, save rare Iowa made radios from destruction, get more visibility of Iowa’s radio heritage.  If we work together, and allow this website to capture the fruits of our mutual efforts, I think that everyone will benefit.  Let us know what you think.

David Fitkin, WB0FZV, a Zenith fan and Collins Radio Collector