Silicon Valley eFlea market photo gallery

The Silicon Valley eFlea electronic flea market was June 11. This is the flea market that Jim Williams was supposed to make, the day before he died. Bob Pease also kept promising me he would come down for one like he did last year, but he died a week later. So in honor of Bob and Jim, here are a bunch of pictures that I snapped at the June 11, 2011 eFlea. The next eFlea is July 9, 2011. Even if you don’t want to get there at 6:00 AM like we do, you can drop over for breakfast afterwards at Bobbi’s in Cupertino, around 9:30. We pretty much take over the outside patio. Click on any picture for a hi-resolution version.



RF dividers and 200 ampere shunts, you have to love the eFlea. And those SMA rf relays in the right bin are handy as well, if you want to set up a test rack for high-speed amplifiers.




40 bucks for this LED traffic light– I wanted it so bad. It is such a dorm-room Animal House throwback, it would make me feel young again. Fortunately I have learned to bring no money to the eFlea and to take my motorcycle so I don’t buy volume absorbers like this. The ammo boxes are for 40mm rounds. Too cool.




Wrenches, clamps and a fishing reel, take your choice.



There are flashlights so bright they will blind you.




This beauty has a Cree LED, and 500 lumens. A car headlamp is 4000, so 8 of these strapped on my motorcycle handlebars and I have a high-reliability redundant lighting system.




A nice lady had a truck full of crystal oscillators. Her dad had a company that made them and she cleaned out his garage after he passed away.




This is why I call you RF guys plumbers. The thing has a copper pipe shorting the connector and it still works. Phil Sittner tried to explain it to me, but I will need him to do it again. I forgot what he called this, folded dipole or a whango tango or some such thing.




My Ham buddies tell me any radioman worth his salt will remember these.




This guy shows up every month with a different batch of test equipment. I am not a Ham, this is why I go to the eFlea.




No, not a Simpson 260, its a Radio Shack Microanta, and a couple cheapos. Great to toss in your trunk or glove box for those emergency troubleshooting needs.




Plenty of vinyl records, and way cheaper than Al’s record barn.




Phil Sittner snapped this one up for a ten-spot. It measures high resistance by putting 1000 volts across the DUT (device under test). Yeah, Phil says it will bite you if you get across the test leads. Probably too dangerous to sell in today’s litigious environment.




This guys sells jewelry tools like loupes and hemostats and dental picks. It is great to have an alternate source for hemostats than the local head shop. A cheap plastic eye loupe is often a preferred method of high magnification. You can work and position stuff while holding the loupe in your eye like a monocle.



There’s gold in them drawers pardner. These connectors are cheap, but they are used mil-spec versions as opposed to Taiwan cheapos. If you put them both on a fast TDR (time-domain reflectometry) setup or a VNA (vector network analyzer), you can see the difference. The mil-spec versions have much more consistent impedance.




This is the people selling the connectors above. She also bought a couple hundred thousand cue-cats, the bar-code reader. She has pretty much sold them all, so order one before they are gone. Nice lady.

Here is audio guru Steve Williams indulging his latest addition, collecting cheap fold-down record players. “Sir! Put the record player down and step away!”




There was this constant voltage transformer I could have gotten for 20 bucks, but it is different than an isolation transformer, which everybody needs. I think this isolates to, but has a variable automatic gap that regulates the output voltage under load changes. My rule is, if I don’t know what it is exactly it is, it is best left on the table.




Tools wrenches, air fittings and decent meter. Next time I am bringing my 1/2″ socket trays that are half-empty and one air fitting so I can match them up.




A Rockwell tester. I wanted this so bad. But I had no money and came on my motorcycle so I was saved.




These went like hotcakes. The cops busted him. I guess a bunch flew out of his truck on the freeway as he drove in, and they caught up to the guy at the eFlea and made him drive back and clean them up.




There are commercial vendors there every month, but they help fill the lot. Now that the State of California is forcing everyone to fill out a tax form, we fear this type of vendor will be all that is left. Tip for you sellers– there is a place on the form that says “Occasional sale”. Check that off and you don’t have to file. You can do it twice a year before the Franchise Tax boards gets antsy and wants a tax ID or a payment.



Audio guru Steve Williams knew that Linda Ronstadt sang for the Stone Poneys before she sleep around with the governor of California. Who knew?




This cool sculpture was available “for the right price.” I didn’t ask. I come with empty pockets, remember.




Nice Bakelite knobs for that radio or guitar restoration.




I don’t know what the “remote control unit” controls, but it has dignity and style, something missing from the plastic crap foisted on us my modern manufacturers.




Mystery and danger, all in a plain brown box. I wanted it. Badly. Good thing I brought no money.




Audio guru Steve Williams tipped me off that this was a “really cool” record player that played both sides of the record. Maybe cool for Steve, but yet another volume absorber for me. I passed.



There are plenty of surprise finds, but every month the lovely Tina shows up with a great selection of useful things. Here is her great selection of shrink tubing.



There is Tina herself, helping a customer figure out how to find a BNC to SMA or maybe it was BNC to N adapter. All those yellow bins are full of adapters.



Tina also has fun and odd-ball items. She had these tubes this month.


And how about a gaggle of air-dielectric variable capacitors? Tina knows what is cool.

So there you have it. Come next month and you are sure to find some cool stuff, some volume absorbers and some like-minded technical people whose company you can enjoy.