[NLRS] CSVHFS Austin conference report

[Jon Platt via NLRS]

Hello NLRS land -

We are just back from last weeks CSVHFS conference in Austin, Texas.  Steve Hicks, N5AC and his team did an outstanding job in organizing and presiding over the fun event. We had approximately 132 conference registrations and about 147 attendees for the Saturday night banquet.  Friday and Saturday both featured an optional lunch-with-speaker that drew just over 100 participated on both days.

Thursday nights family program was a short bus ride to Lady Bird lake where we enjoyed a cruise & sight seeing tour of Austin, a buffet dinner (excellent), topped off by watching a couple of million bats exit from under the Congress Ave bridge that spans across the lake.  Temperatures were warm but not unbearable being a bit cooler on the water.   

Friday morning featured the antenna range (no rain this year), noise figure measurements, the vendor room opened (featuring DownEast, Hanger 18, and FlexRadio), and the rover/dish row was up and running featuring several rovers.  W5LUA also demo'ed a 10 GHz EME QSO and sun noise measurements.  Again, no rain and the temperature was warm but not bad.   During lunch, K5SDR presented on receiver dynamics and proposed a way to measure receiver performance.  The afternoon featured the start of the technical presentations along with a fund raising auction of goodies.   The family program featured a bus trip to Fredericksburg, a local historic town.

Saturday featured the day long technical presentations and VHF-101.  The lunch time speaker was W6PQL who discussed various aspects of solid state amplifiers.  The family program featured a bus ride to Natural Bridge Caverns ending with a side trip to the San Marcos Premium Outlets.  The conference ended Saturday evening with a banquet.  Our banquet speaker was W6JKV who spoke about his experiences from his many many 6m dxpeditions.

Next years CSVHFS President is K2AD, Doug Sharp.  The conference location is Denver.   Watch for future postings as more information becomes known.

It was an excellent conference.  NLRS was well represented with one of our own grabbing the #1 prize number drawing (and no, it was not W9FZ).  I greatly enjoyed K5SDRs presentation on SDR receiver characteristics and testing methods, K6MIO presentation on F-Region Propagation and the Equatorial Ionospheric Anomaly, N6NB's talk on Working Hawaii on VHF, 1957-2014, and rover/dish row.

73, Jon
W0ZQ