More on the Huntsville Hamfest

With the Sunday youtuber session already covered in Monday's post, let's move on to the real meat & vegetables of the hamfest, Saturday's forums.  The full schedule is here (for the moment, this will change as 2025 draws near), but here are the talks I attended, with corresponding notes and links:

• Solar Activity: By the Numbers by Rob Suggs NN4NT.  A NASA solar physicist, he covered the various measurements from sites such this one, what they mean, and what makes for good or bad propagation.  I have a lot of review ahead of me to catch up with all this.  One site the presenter especially steered listeners to is https://www.swpc.noaa.gov
• Lightning Protection for Hams by Monte Bateman WB5RZX.  Yet another NASA physicist, he has designed lightning protection systems for just about everything in the organization, including launch pads.  Lots of practical take-away lessons from this talk, with enough measurement and theory to keep it above the cookbook-level and into real insights.  You can download a copy of the slides at https://www.lightninganswers.com/ (you will have to sign up for his email list, which is a more than fair trade)  He also recommends http://www.arrl.org/lightning-protection 
• Quantum Entanglement by Hans Schantz KC5VLD.  More of a physics talk than anything to do with ham radio, he finally in the last couple of slides touched on the possibilities of quantum communications.  It was a fun talk, and perhaps even more (if slightly evil) fun listening to the sound of various engineering minds being bent into 4-D pretzels.  Curiously, Schantz mentioned in passing that he's in the hidden variable camp, something that I thought went out with Bell's theorem and various follow-up experiments.  Still, he seems to have thought deeply on the matter, and I'll have to read his forthcoming book Fields & Energy.  Links & recommended books: https://aetherczar.substack.com/, The Quantum Theory of Motion by Peter R. Holland, and Quantum Paradoxes and Physical Reality by Franco Selleri.

Onward to the rest of the show... Booths after booths after tables after tables of everything from new cutting-edge SDRs to beautiful old cathedral radios.  Strangely, I only picked up a few items:

• More PowerPole connectors.  You can never have enough of these if you're going to PowerPole the World.  As one should.
• The radiotoday guide to the Yaesu FT-710 by ZL3DW.  Hoping for more insight to my new radio, more than that miserable manual and random poking have so far yielded.
• Modern Data Modes: A guide to using WSJT-X, JTDX, fldigi, FT8, FT4, PSK, JS8, VarAC and other modes by PJ4DX.  Again, hoping to gain more insights into the seemingly inscrutable details behind these.
• Talked with a couple from north Mississippi who had bought out MFJ's demo stock and were selling it at various shows.  Hopefully something good will come of MFJ's reported shutdown, before the entire enterprise gets picked apart or abandoned.  Good people, all.
• Met a guy from Bay St. Louis, my old town!  That was pretty cool.
• No joy on either the data cable or dual-bander radio that I was looking for.  That's how it goes sometimes.
• Did I think to take a single picture of the exhibition hall?  Of course not!  Here, go dig around at the Hamfest web site, you'll find better pictures than I could take anyway.

Beyond that... I had a wonderful time with my brother and his family.  Back next year?  Time will tell.

It has come to my attention that this post has no graphics at all.  Pretty bland.  Here, let's spice it up with a really happy graphic, one that puts a smile on my face every time it pops up on the web:

That is all for today, and it is more than enough.