After the 6+ hour road trip (me navigating, not that Doug needed it)
and a night in the motel, Doug, Andrew and I arrived at the shuttle bus
parking Friday morning. Andrew looks like a little kid on his
first school bus trip :-)
It was a little embarrassing to only have a magmount 2 meter antenna in this parking lot.
We arrive at the Ham Radio Mecca
This is what it looks like from the air, the 2 arenas and convention
halls have commercial vendors, the smaller commercial vendors and private
sellers are in the outdoor flea market to the top and right (thus the
remote parking and Buses)
The main hall featured
Icom,
Kenwood and all the other "biggies". It was
fun watching them take down all of those verticals when we were sitting
in the arena stands for the final prize draw.
Yaesu had a nice booth in one of the other halls. Doug did not
figure he could hide this from his XYL if he charged it on the old VISA
card.
Yaesu had a great vintage collection on display.
Typical crowd scenes in the other arena and halls. It took us all of Friday to cover the indoor exhibits.
Took us all day Saturday to cover the outdoor fleamarket. As you can
see, had BEAUTIFUL weather. Doug actually got a sunburn.
Heard
some old fart COMPLAINING on one of the repeaters that the weather was
TOO NICE (he got a sunburn and it was "too hard on the eyes"). Some guys
will complain about ANYTHING. One of the locals said they would
make sure they got the rain
back for next year :-)
On Sunday morning we looped back and talked to some people at
AMSAT,
APRS,
TAPR
and other booths. Interesting to talk to the actual guys who are doing some really
interesting stuff. Andrew got a real kick out of this Cubesat
engineering prototype. We stayed for the final draw in the main arena at 1:00 PM Sun, but did not win anything.
