Dayton 2012

I just got back from my annual pilgrimage to Dayton, Ohio, for Hamvention 2012. I flew in on Thursday and spent the afternoon with a few friends at the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB. If you have never been, this museum is fantastic and never gets old. This year they added some recently declassified spy satellites!

We were blessed with good weather this year, if not almost too hot! Not a single cloud either Friday or Saturday, both days were in the upper 80's.

There was lots of good junk for sale, but the only major purchase I made was a Tektronix 2465 scope. I happen to be hanging out with a scope aficionado and he gave me the pros and cons of the 2465. It sounded well within my level of risk and I managed to find one for fairly short money. I have to give a lot of credit to Alan, W2AEW, for influencing me on making this purchase. I've been watching his Youtube channel, he has some really great videos on how to use your scope. He has a 2465 and I've fallen in love with it while watching his demos.  

Stay tuned for another update on my PCB design.

W1RJA EME event with Arecibo

The EME event at the Eastern VHF Conference was a big success! We participated in the Echoes of Apollo on the air event and successfully made contact with KP4AO at the Arecibo Observatory. I put together a 10 minute video that shows the station and our contact. I also has some comedic relief towards the end!

Arecibo Moon Bounce this weekend

This coming weekend (April 16-18th, 2010) is the Echos of Apollo EME event. A group of hams will be operating EME from the world famouse Arecebo observatory in Puerto Rico.

This weekend is also the Eastern VHF Conference hosted by the NEWS group. I will be in attendace at the conference doing some video taping.

A bonus for anyone attending the conference, Dave, K1WHS, has been hard at work building a 432MHz EME station that will be assembled Saturday morning. This station is complete with a 1500w amp and dual long-yagi's on an Az-el rotor. Should be a fun time for anyone in attendance, hopefully we'll have some video sometime next week.

2009 AMSAT Symposium

AMSAT will be holding it's annual symposium this year at the Four Point Sheraton at BWI Airport. After being an AMSAT member for a long time, I'm finally going to be attending the symposium. Typically I've had another meeting that was scheduled the same week every year, this year the schedule is different and I have the time. I even managed to convince my friend Mark to play hookey friday and come to the Crypto and Electronics museums. See you in Baltimore!

Eastern VHF/UHF conference this weekend

This weekend I'm heading down to Enfield, CT to attend the Eastern VHF/UHF conference. It will be good to see some radio friends and hopefully make some plans for the 10GHz contest this coming summer. Pictures to follow soon!