Day 2 was hotter than Day 1 but I had the lay of the land so I did the flea market in the morning and watched the air conditioned forums in the afternoon.
Today I hit traffic on the way in, but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the way out yesterday.
The flea market is massive here. I spent over 2 hours looking through it.
I came across this guy (forgot to get his callsign), he was running a net from the flea market on an old Vietnam era field radio. The net was for people operating for old military radios. This is another section of the hobby I didn’t know existed or that it would interest me. I’d seen old military equipment around other flea markets but I didn’t know there was a group actively using them. The radio worked way better than I would have expected and it will be something I’ll be looking into.
I took a break in a rare shady area and watched some robots.
First, I watched the DX forum where a bunch of different DXpeditions gave presentations. I talked to a few of the guys about getting in on a DXpedition but they have their crews filled up. I’m pretty sure I’ll end up having to organize my own. I’m ok with that, I’ll start small and work my way up.
I had lunch and then watched the Contesting forum. First up was Marty NN1C, he gave the best presentation I saw the entire weekend. He’s 17 years old and very interested in getting more younger people into ham radio. I hope he’s successful as the graphs he showed don’t paint a good picture of the future participation of the hobby. He seems like a good leader and I think he’ll do good things for the hobby.
After that I went back to my AirBnB to relax for an hour or so and then went to the Contest Dinner. I saw Dan K1TO from Tom’s antenna party there. Ted Rappaport N9NB gave an amazing key note speech about his life. He’s got his own Wikipedia page. He’s a professor at NYU and writes the books on cellular technology(including 5G).
Then I went to the Wouff Hong ceremony, which is a secret society, so that’s all I’ll say about that, unless you’re member, then we can talk.
Overall I really enjoyed the convention. There’s a lot of people to meet and they’ve all been at this a long time, so felt like a bit of an outsider. But like anything, time will solve that.