Ria's Ham Shack News - Hamvention final
ARRL talks finances and LoTW, sBITX brings inexpensive SDR, FreeDV update, Hamvention award winners, CQ Hall of Fame nominees and more!
Hamvention 2023 is in the books. Hope you all had fun, learned something or otherwise made the most of it.
I’ll have some videos up on the YouTube channel within the coming weeks. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any!
There is SO much news, but we curate things we think you may be interested in. As always, if you have a news tip, please send it to ria@n2rj.com and I’ll report on it!
In this issue:
ARRL talks finances and LoTW
sBITX brings inexpensive, feature-filled SDR
FreeDV update
Hamvention award winners
CQ Hall of Fame nominees
Contest Hall of Fame
Amateur Radio Hall of Fame
Parachute mobile at Hamvention!
ARRL talks finances and LoTW
ARRL at its member forum at Hamvention talked about a number of topics including its finances and the status of Logbook of The World.
Finances
ARRL’s Treasurer, John Sager, WJ7S discussed the financial health of the League. Topics included cash flow and investment performance, the Investment Management Committee and investment manager Captrust which was contracted by the League in 2022 to manage its investments.
ARRL has also been seeking member input on a potential increase to its annual member dues. A survey for members to express their opinion on the dues increase is here.
LoTW
ARRL’s Robert Naumann, W5OV spoke about the operation of Logbook of The World. This included how ARRL has modified the intake of logs to better queue them for inbound processing, hardware upgrades and a recent incident where an update to a software package caused LoTW to suffer a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). This package was gridtracker, and it made frequent calls to LoTW (sometimes as often as 1/2 a second) and retried those calls when they failed. The result was that LoTW was in a constant death spiral, with gridtracker constantly hitting it, even when it was down.
Year of the Volunteer
ARRL’s President, Rick Roderick, K5UR called on members to tell their stories of volunteering for the ARRL and amateur radio. Several volunteers talked about volunteering for youth education, as volunteer examiners and in the field organization and club leadership. ARRL is hosting a year long “Year of the Volunteer” operating event which celebrates volunteers with on-air activity including W1AW/x portable operations from every US state.
sBITX brings inexpensive, feature-filled SDR
Ashhar Farhan, VU2ESE demonstrated the sBITX, a fully featured 40 watt (maximum) HF transceiver. The transceiver includes full ham band transmit coverage from 80 through 10 meters and receive coverage from 100kHz to 30MHz. It also features built-in FT8 and easy remote via a web interface. The design is entirely open source in hardware and software.
Here is a short clip. I will have a full video up soon.
FreeDV update
Mooneer Salem, K6AQ presented updates to FreeDV in the digital voice forum. This included various updates to improve bandwidth utilization and voice quality.
Hamvention award winners
Dayton Hamvention spokesperson and awards chair Michael Kalter, W8CI presented awards at its annual banquet. The recipients were:
Club of the year - Delaware Valley Radio Association (DVRA)
Technical Achievement - Dr. James Breakall, WA3FET
Amateur of the year - Carsten Dauer, DM9EE.
DVRA is a Southern New Jersey club that has been involved in several outreach and education efforts including working with Nobel Laureate Joe Taylor, K1JT to operate a 1296MHz EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) station.
Dr. James “Jim” Breakall, WA3FET has been a professor at Penn State University for many years and has designed antennas for various projects including HAARP in Alaska and the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico.
Carsten Dauer, DM9EE has been active in humanitarian efforts for Ukraine. He has hosted Ukrainian refugees at his hotel in Germany and has collected and transported relief supplies to the Polish-Ukrainian border to assist Ukrainians impacted by the war.
Contest Hall of Fame inductees announced
The CQ Contest Hall of Fame inductees for 2023 were announced at the Dayton Contest Dinner held at the Hope Hotel in Dayton. They are:
Kirk Pickering, K4RO - Founding member, past president and past vice president of the Tennessee Contest Group; webmaster of TCG website; has hosted many new contesters at multi-ops from his home station; 3-time US winner in ARRL Sweepstakes CW/QRP category and regular top-ten finisher in multiple contests; past editor and columnist ("Contesting 101") for National Contest Journal.
Ken Claerbout, K4ZW – Accomplished contester both domestically and as DX, operating from over a dozen countries around the world. A driving force in the ongoing training and mentoring of students at ET3AA, the radio club at the Addis Ababa University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. On a recent visit, he helped students install one of the few HF skimmers in Africa to feed the Reverse Beacon Network. He has served in multiple positions for the YASME Foundation and is past president of the Potomac Valley Radio Club. In that role, he began a series of contesting-related webinars that has morphed into today's Contest University.
Bernhard "Ben" Buettner, DL6RAI – Avid contester and contest administrator who has operated from 49 different DX entities. Co-founder and past president of the Bavarian Contest Club (BCC), Ben helped develop and maintain the club's DX cluster, the first in Germany. He is also a past director of the Worked All Europe DX Contest (WAEDC). In that role, he spearheaded the conversion from paper to electronic logging and the introduction of electronic log checking. Ben is also a former member of the CQWW Contest Committee, served as IT manager for WRTC-2018 in Germany, and has been a beta tester for Win-Test contest logging software. (Ben became a silent key this past week after a tower accident in Aruba).
CQ Amateur Radio Hall of Fame inductees announced
And they are:
Andrew "Andy" Andros, W0LTE (SK), and brother Theodore "Ted" Andros, W0URN (SK), founders of Hy-Gain Corp. Their first antenna, the TH-3 triband trap beam, got the company off to a solid start. The company went on to become a major antenna manufacturer for the amateur, CB, military and diplomatic markets; later sold to Telex and then to MFJ Enterprises, which continues to produce Hy-Gain antennas, rotors and accessories.
John G. "Jack" Curtis, K6KU (SK) – Revolutionized CW keying by developing circuitry for an iambic memory keyer and putting it on a chip. The chips were later integrated into many commercial transceivers featuring built-in electronic keyers.
Gerald "Jerry" Lawson, WA6LVN (SK) – Pioneer of home video games, helping to develop the first cartridge-based video game controller, which allowed users to switch between multiple games. Also one of the few African-American engineers working in the computer industry as the first video games were developed.
Parachute Mobile at Hamvention
Carlos, KD9OLN made several skydiving jumps near Hamvention and made contacts while descending. He has a YouTube channel called “Life at Terminal Velocity.” You can see one of his jumps including where I made contact with him on the Modern Ham channel:
ARDC’s Executive Director, Rosy Schechter, KJ7RYV also made a contact.
Hamvention coverage now QRT
Thank you for following our special 2023 Hamvention coverage! We will resume normal amateur radio news next Sunday.