NOTE: This page changes frequently, and I won't retain old descriptions. It's mainly a forum for showing off pictures of recent trips to Austin QRP Club meetings, ham fests & swap fests, and other ham-related activities that may be of temporary interest to someone besides myself.
The Austin QRP Club hosts Austin Summerfest's annual QRP forum, which typically has an attendence of 45-50 hams, and is highlighted by great presentations and lotsa door prizes. 2003 was no different.
A special thanks to NorCal, the American QRP Club, the Arizona ScQRPions, the Four State QRP Group, the ARRL, and Austin QRP Club membership for supplying many great give-aways. All were well received and very much appreciated, and generated a lot of interest. Stuart Rohre K5KVH and Glen Reid K5FX were favorite sons as they passed out the freebies:
And a personal thank-you to the Austin QRP Club and Glen Reid, K5FX, for my award as "AQRP Master QRPer 2003"... you snuck up on me with that one... wow!
We had three great presentations: John Fisher, K5JHF started off by showing us what can be done with a microcontroller, one additional chip, and a sprinkling of R's & C's. What resulted was a cool device which could superimpose whatever test you typed from a PC keyboard (sans the PC) onto an NTSC video stream. Very impressive! Pix below:
Next, Ron Sparks, KG5RS, showed us how to homebrew switching power supplies for QRP equipment, taking much of the risk, mystery, and black magic out of the process; Pix below. The third picture are some resource URLs for building switching power supplies. Thanks, Ron!
Finally, Gerald Youngblood, fellow Austinite and recent recipient of the ARRL Doug DeMaw W1FB Technical Excellence award, presented some info on Software-Defined Radio. This is now real-ware, and available from Flex Radio. Here are some pix:
While I greatly enjoyed the entire forum, the highlight for me is pictured below:
73,
Monty N5ESE
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