I finally went to the “Hamcation” and…
Written by David Saylors WK4DS
…it’s complicated. You know how they say you should never meet your heros? Well…that is a pretty close comparison to Hamcation in many ways for me. In other ways, this was the best hamfest I have ever attended.
What I mean is that over the years I have built this event up in my mind to be something more than a hamfest. In many ways it is, but at its very core, it is still a hamfest. They did have a metric ton of activities going on as well, as long as you knew where to look for them or you might miss them. It really was impressive as to the scale of it. There was so many people there. To say it was a large crowd would be an understatement, there were SO many cars…
All the big names in the industry were present from Flex to Elecraft as well as the big 3 (Icom, Yaesu, and Kenwood) to all sorts of other vendors in the space. Point is, if there was a radio that you wanted to see, sans Kenwood (who only brought their top tier machines for some reason), you could get some hands on time and actually see them in person.
After wandering both main halls, I made my way to the bone yard to see what kind of gear is available in Florida. Seems like every area has different items in the bone yard and Orlando Hamcation was no different in this regard. Tge first thing I noticed was how spread out and kind of disorganized it was. It was like there was a huge area set aside and there were spaces marked but it was just kind of chaotic in the layout or so it seemed. What this meant for me was more walking, alot more as you would spot another vendor after rounding a corner or such as that. Sort of like a maze populated with “cool widgets of radio” HaHa! There was a lot of amplifiers here and I mean a lot of them. Seems floridians like to have plenty of transmitting power on hand. I even found a giant 5 kilowatt amp that was in project form that was for sale…
I had to include a Ten Tec rig… I have a soft spot for them. And I have many more Ten Tec photos on my personal (WK4DS) blog post about this event if you are into them.
On top of the main halls, the bone yard and another building called “SWAPS” for some reason… they had onsite testing, and a HUGE tent area setup for keynote speakers and forums. Since I had a slightly different agenda, I didn’t attend either of these areas. Thinking about it post event, I was so overwhelmed with the amount of activity that I failed to get photos of several things that would have been noteworthy. Things like the AMSAT station that was setup outside and the ARES commo trailer. But such is life… I did grab a quick photo of the POTA booth which was busy all day.
There was one new product that was there that I was interested in. The new Elecraft KH1 ultralight HF QRP radio. (Pictured below) This radio is designed primarily for SOTA from what I can tell. Compact size, virtually weightless, built in logbook and pen, it is a complete station that is the size of a deck of playing cards. This, in my opinion, is the perfect SOTA radio. I don’t remember what all bands it covers, but there are a lot of them. It even has a built in antenna tuner if you wanted to run a random wire antenna. The felllow in the Elecraft booth said that the ultralight 40m EFHW wire antennas with a counterpoise worked really well too. It is a CW only machine but it was really cool to see that they are working on projects for the community that is always pushing the envelope.
Something that never seems to cease to amaze me is that there are always people inventing new ways to do the same job. This is RF KITS who are making amplifiers and these things are nice! They come as a “kit” and are controlled by a raspberry pi 4 (this is a growing trend) and also have a built in antenna tuner as well. How cool is that?
I will admit that if you have never been, I would recommend going at least once to see the sheer spectacle of it. If not to get some new toys for your shack or even to let go of something that you no longer use.
73
WK4DS