[SADXA] IDXC Visalia, 2017

[Jim Wysocki]

This year marked my second trip to the Visalia International DX 
Conference, and here are my thoughts about the experience.

I traveled with Carl KB7AZ and Steve N2IC in Carl's airplane. Carl and I 
stayed in the same motel and drove back and forth to the Visalia 
Convention Center.  Steve stayed across the street from the conference 
location, so Carl and I saw little of him until it was time to return to 
Tucson.  Carl was one of the speakers, presenting a well-received talk 
about stealth antennas. He brought a few with him to demonstrate what 
could be done to disguise an antenna, or to render it less visible from 
the road. His bird house concealment for a balun was particularly 
popular, with several people taking pictures of it.

This year the proceedings began on Friday and ended late Sunday 
morning.  It met my definition of a good conference, in that I couldn't 
be in all of the places I wanted to be: several high-quality 
presentations were occurring simultaneously.  The ones I enjoyed most 
were about the DXLab software suite, Software Defined Radios, stealth 
antennas, finding and killing receiver noise, and propagation 
predictions for the end of sunspot cycle 24 and the beginning of cycle 25.

Most of the vendors who cater to DXers were there.  Elecraft, FlexRadio 
Systems, Icom, and Yaesu showed their latest and greatest products, as 
did several antenna manufacturers like M2, StepIR, and Next Generation 
Antennas (from N6BT, the founder of Force12 Antennas).  The major tower 
fabricators were there as well: US Towers, Tashjian Towers, KF7P Metal 
Works, and Laso Towers from Japan.  Laso had the same gigantic tower on 
display as they did last year.  It was a 100-foot plus, self-supporting 
steel tower that weighed many tons and cost $40,000.  It looked like it 
could survive hurricane-strength winds with a six-element HF antenna on 
top.  US Towers had a large portable tower set up outside the Convention 
Center with the latest StepIR on top of it.  This antenna was set up for 
the use of the special events station which was operating inside.

Ham Radio Outlet had a large sales area and had a lot of inventory to 
sell on-site.  Sales were pretty good at their booth.   There also were 
a few specialty parts vendors there, selling connectors, LEDs, patch 
cords, batteries, and more.  I don't think they sold enough stuff to 
cover their cost of doing business, but they were there anyway.  Kenwood 
and DXEngineering should have been there but were not.

There were several major prizes in the raffle: top-of-the-line 
transceivers mostly.  Tens of thousands of raffle tickets were sold.  I 
saw two occasions where somebody spent more than two hours filling out 
raffle tickets, using rubber stamps to imprint their call signs on 
them.  These guys spent many thousands of dollars improving their odds 
of being a big winner.  However the law of averages didn't work for 
either of them this year.  Neither won a major prize.

Comparing this year's conference with last year's I'd say they were 
almost identical in structure and content.  It was rewarding to attend.  
But unless something major happens to suddenly transform the DXing 
world, I'll take a couple of years off before going back to Visalia.

Jim  W9FI