It's a good thing that I'm a LONG way from Dayton! I would never see the light of day again.
Well, the Mendelsons experience never gets dull, but eventually the human body becomes numb after walking up and down aisles that are several football fields in length. There just isn't enough time in a single day to stop and examine every interesting trinket, some of which might be actually useful in a project. So, it helps to set aside a week or so and bring plenty of cash or credit cards... you will never be able to find an item on subsequent days that you should have purchased when you first saw it. I know this from experience. There is simply too much inventory to remember where everything is. And it's all rather loosely organized more or less by function. You have to see it to believe it, but I promise you will eventually see the light of day again. Mendelsons closes promptly at 5:00 PM and you DO NOT want to be locked in the store after business hours!
@(*steve*), who lives in Australia, was visiting relatives in nearby Indiana last year, so I offered to show him around the Dayton area... (Neal)
Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta,
Wright Brothers Memorial on a hill overlooking Huffman Prairie at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,
National Museum of the Air Force and (of course) Mendelsons. He found some spiffy blank circuit board material at a good price, but we spent only a few hours touring the 3rd Floor before Steve had to prepare for his return to Indiana and eventually Australia. All in all, a very pleasant day trip and experience for both of us. Well, at least I enjoyed it, and maybe Steve did too.
So, for the price of an airplane ticket, you can fly a LONG way to get to Dayton and visit Mendelsons. You might want to arrange such a trip around the annual Dayton Hamvention where you can find lots of "treasure" in the flea market. Mendelsons packs up several tons of stuff for this event and sells it from a huge tent in the flea market at Hamvention. And of course there are other vendors selling their wares at Hamvention, most but not all of it oriented towards amateur (ham) radio. Come early and make room reservations early, too. Hamvention attracts upwards of twenty thousand paid ticket holders every year, including a few hundred visitors from Europe and Asia.
