That's a great question, Gordon. It's probably a confluence of a number of factors. (a bit of a braindump here...)
- Moar stuff! Many of the booths there had one or two people sitting there and their booth had a banner hanging on the back booth wall, and some literature on the table. Contrast that with the AREDN booth this year: we had a 32" monitor on the table slaved to a laptop, and props to KM6SLF for providing a huge portable screen, that sat next to our booth (we were on the end of a row and had room for it) and was illuminated by a projector provided by KE6BXT. Said projector was driven from another laptop. Both laptops had access to both the AREDN network and the Internet, via SCALE's provided network. They showed at various times, the local AREDN network (via the network mapper written by KG6WXC) and various webcams, both on the Expo floor and out on the AREDN network. We also had an assortment of wireless gear on the table for folks to pick up and look at.
- Engagement. Many of the other booth occupants merely sat at their table and waited for someone to stop and ask a question. Contrast that with AREDN's 'booth buddies': if someone stopped to look at the stuff on our tables (lots of hardware!) one of us would pounce on them with a "Can I help you?" and launch into our spiel about IP networking over ham radio :-) And I want to shout out to the AREDN folks that helped at the booth: Don KE6BXT; Eric KG6WXC; Eric N6RFI, Tim KN6PLV; Bill KM6SLF; Mathison, KJ6DZB (who flew down from the Bay area for the day); Kiley KD8DRX, and me, W6BI. Each and everyone one of them stepped up to the plate and engaged with passersby.
- Literature! AREDN sent us 25 AREDN handouts; they were gone mid-morning on Saturday. Need more next year! And next year we'll get handouts from ARRL about how to get your ham radio license. Props to Eric N6RFI for printing out an 8 1/2 x 11 with the URL and QR code to the ARRL's "Getting your license" page on Saturday night, so we had it for folks Sunday.
SCALE isn't a ham radio conference; its focus is Linux and Open Source applications. So the bulk of the attendees are folks in the IT industry. That being said, a significant percentage of visitors to the booth either had a ham license but were inactive, or said they'd always wanted to get their ticket and thought AREDN networking "is cool" and maybe they'd get their ticket just to mess around with IP networking over ham radio. We'll see what happens :-)
We already have a mental list of things we can do better next year.
And we'll be at Hamvention in May and are already discussing what we'll do there. I submitted a presentation proposal and it was accepted, but we need a good booth presence, too.
Hope this helps!
73
Orv W6BI
On 3/12/23 18:24, Gordon Beattie, W2TTT wrote:
Orv,Congratulations to you and your team! That's very cool to have that recognition from the attendees!
I know that you have done this for several years, so I am wondering what did you change in the booth or the presentation? Was it something about AREDN's evolution that created some "buzz"?
For those of us in other places, we are curious so that we can do the same "right things" and avoid the bsd or wasteful things.
Again, congratulations to you and the team!
Get On The Air!