Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dave Zantow (N9EWO), who notes that Radio City in Mounds View, MN, will be closing its doors soon.
Ham City owners, Dan and Maline Fish, are retiring. They posted the following message on their website:
Sept. 11th, 2018
It’s Time to Retire.
Dan and Maline Fish of Radio City
It’s been a wonderful 36 years for us at Radio City and we have decided to retire and close Radio City. 🙁 We are so thankful for the many years of support and we have enjoyed working you, our customers. The technical, intelligent and polite conversations plus advice have been invigorating, thus making this decision extremely difficult for us.
We appreciate all the teachers, Elmers, VE examiners, ham and astronomy clubs efforts in growing new ham radio operators and amateur astronomers into our special community.
We will also miss going to and supporting amateur radio and astronomy clubs all over MN and IA at their events. We will greatly miss all the friendships we have been privileged to maintain with many of our customers.
We plan to exit by this year’s end or a bit sooner as we empty our shelves of new and used materials.
Upcoming Events:
Final Goodbye Tour:
We will be at Smartfest in Cologne, MN on Saturday September 22nd. We will also be in Carlton MN for their Fallfest on Saturday September 29th.
Goodbye Party:
Please come on by on Saturday October 6th for our good bye party. We will of course have cake and coffee for everybody.
Other Necessary Details:
Service:
We will complete servicing items we currently have in the service dept. We will not be accepting any additional ‘Out of warranty’ items. ‘In warranty’ items will be still be processed by Radio City per normal until about October 31st, 2018.
Consignment :
We will no longer accept more items for consignment. All items that have NOT been sold need to be picked up the week of Oct 13th, 2018. We will consider all items not picked up by then to be abandoned.
In closing we will very much miss all of you and perhaps there is someone out there interested in running the store under New Management.
Thanks again for all your support,
Dan and Maline Fish
Link to Fox9 News story about the store closing:
http://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-s-last-ham-radio-store-to-close-its-doors-as-owners-retire
I live approximately 1270-miles away so I’ve never been to their shop. But I stumbled across their web site many, many years ago and I was quite happy to see they are a radio AND an astronomical equipment dealer … I’ve never seen a small shop like this sell Ham/SW radios AND telescopes side-by-side. Very cool.
It’s sad to see them go – but as a retiree myself, I wish them nothing but happiness and contentment.
Sheldon Harvey here in the Montreal area sells radio related products, but then some years later got interested in birdwatching, so he also sells books related to that.
Adding another line helps to keep a business viable, and if there’s no overlap, there’s probably similarity in both customer bases, and dealing with niche markets.
Michael
Ahh, what a bummer! I have bought and sold $$$$’s of equipment with them. Dan and Maline are great people and they always had great staff too. Hope someone can step up and buy the place. But it’s a gotta be a tough go with all the online options that are available.