Becky Schoenfeld, W1BXY

QST Managing Editor

The first day of Hamvention® 2014 brought a great deal of activity for exhibitors and attendees alike. The ARRL Expo exhibit area saw considerable traffic as hams applied for memberships and renewals, brought gear to be tested at the ARRL Lab’s booth, and brought cards to be checked at the DXCC table.

Today’s forums included a showing of “ARRL at 100: A Century of Ham Radio,” the 25-minute video the ARRL produced to help promote ham radio in the League’s centennial year and beyond. The room was filled to capacity with an enthusiastic audience.

ARRL presented the 2013 Bill Orr, W6SAI, Technical Writing Award to Carl Luetzelschwab, K9LA, in the afternoon. The ARRL Foundation selected Luetzelschwab at its January 21 meeting for his article “The Sun and the Ionosphere,” which appeared in the March 2013 issue of QST. Luetzelschwab won the March QST Cover Plaque Award last year for the same article. Luetzelschwab, who frequently writes on solar and propagation phenomena and trends, is the “Propagation” columnist for NCJ — National Contest Journal. Central Division Director Dick Isely, W9GIG, presented Luetzelschwab with the award plaque.

New products seen at Hamvention on Friday included the TEN-TEC Patriot, Model 507, a dual band (20 and 40 meters) SSB/CW QRP transceiver that modifies easily for custom applications. It runs on an Uno32 microprocessor, and uses Arduino-compatible software.

Yaesu’s new offering, the DR-1X repeater, is an improvement on the DR-1 that was beta-tested last year.

For more photos, see the Dayton Hamvention 2014 photo album on the ARRL’s Facebook page.