News from the QRP Labs participation in the QRP ARCI Four Days In May (FDIM) event at Holiday Inn Fairborn and the "Dayton" hamvention at Xenia fairground, May 2019.
I'm very grateful to Dave VE3KCL for all his assistance with all QRP Labs activities particularly manning the very busy QRP Labs booths at the hamvention and FDIM vendor evening.
FDIM Seminar "Challenges of SSB: the development of the QSX all-mode HF transceiver kit", by Hans G0UPL
This talk introduced the forthcoming QSX transceiver kit and tried to focus on discussion of why designing a high performance SSB transceiver is a lot more challenging than a CW transceiver, and some of the design details and engineering decisions involved. The talk was recorded (audio only) by the Ham Radio Workbench podcast. Slides and the accompanying conference proceedings booklet article are both available, see below.
The podcast also includes a very interesting interview with Eric Swartz WA6HHQ about the beautiful new K4 transceiver. Pretty impressive stuff and the price difference compared to QSX certainly appears smaller if you express it in decibel terms as 13 dB ;-)
SLIDES (34 slides in PDF format, 3.2MBytes download)
Conference proceedings article (26 pages in PDF format, 1.7MBytes download)
Ham Radio Workbench podcast - seminar recording starts at 51 minutes into the podcast
CW Ops award for advancing the art of CW
Hans G0UPL was presented with the CW Ops award "in recognition of his outstanding achievement in advancing the art of CW". It was a great honour to receive this award from such a prestigious association in ham radio, for the contribution to CW made by the QCX 5W CW Transceiver kit design.
At time of writing (23-May-2019) a total of 7,449 QCX 5W CW Transceiver kits have been sold since the launch in August 2017. I receive many emails from people encouraged to learn CW by building the kit.
I attended the CW Ops club awards banquet on the other side of Dayton to FDIM to be presented the award, managing to get over there after the seminars and back to the Holiday Inn Fairborn in time for vendor's evening. Thursday 16th May was a busy day indeed.
FDIM Vendor's night
Thursday evening's vendor night activity saw the QRP Labs table very busy again this year, a continuous crowd around, who wanted to purchase some kits, talk, and/or look at the QCX transceiver prototype or other demonstrations. Once again I have no idea what the other vendor tables in the room were up to, since I never left my spot there in the middle...
Hamvention booth
Friday and Saturday of the hamvention were very very busy around the QRP Labs booth, with Sunday a bit more peaceful. Once again we were in the Clearspan tent "building" 6, but thankful of our position near the end, with a pleasant breeze offsetting the warmth and high humidity. Stock of all the QRP Labs kits (excluding enclosures) were available for purchase, with many kits operating for demonstration purposes. Many people wanted to see the QSX transceiver prototype.
Interview with Faith Hannah KD3Z on HamRadio.World
It was nice to meet with Faith Hannah again, after the last interview in Johannesburg, S.Africa at the YOTA 2018 summercamp event. Great to meet the rest of the family too! Faith Hannah, her three siblings, and both parents are all amateur radio operators! See http://hamradio.world/about/ and the HamRadio.World YouTube channel.
Interview with ICQ PodCast
Going home... somewhere over Iceland
