QRPacificon 2008

The speakers this year were fantastic. I heard nothing but good comments about every one of them. Dave Farden, Doug Quagliana, Dan Tayloe and Jim Duffey were as good a group of speakers as you would want to see and hear. Dave and Doug were first time speakers at Pacificon and I would highly recommend both of them to any other qrp group that is looking for speakers. The same goes for Dan Tayloe (4th time speaker) and Jim Duffey who set a record for speaking at Pacificon for the 5th time!! We will try and get the slides of the talk up on the NorCal page in a few days.

Friday night we had a show and tell event, and participation was light, but the quality was fantastic. NorCal awarded 1st Place of a 2N2xx kit to Ken LoCasale for his Paraset Reproduction Transceiver. Second Place went to Doug Quagliana for his homebrew satellite antenna collection. Next year we hope to see a lot more entries.

Saturday night featured our vendor night and flea market. Lots of activity here. Plus we gave away some great door prizes. Here are the winners and prize donators. Thanks to Kathy Long for a great job of writing this information down.

Door prize Winners are below

2N2 40 M kit - KF4EEL, Karen Locasale
2N2 30 M kit - KA6IRL, Lee Hutchins
2N2 20 M kit - WA6QWY, Don Butterfield
NorCal power meter kit - KI6BEA
NorCal Power meter - W6JND, Janet Dunlop
CY the LED Guy Gift Certificate - AD6JV, Bill Phillips
PFR 3 w/Paddle from Hendricks QRP Kits - WA6NGH, Sam Vigil
PAC 12 Antenna Kit from Pacific Antenna - W8MZ, Mike Paul
Paddle Kit from American Morse - WA6ARA, Mike Herr
Beam Antenna from Vern Wright's Super Antennas and NorCal - WA7KMA, Rich Hamlin

$1500 in prizes given away thanks to the support of our vendors.

Lots of activity on QRP row in the commercial vendor area. Hendricks QRP Kits, American Morse, Pacific Antenna and NorCal all reported brisk sales and were pleased with the results. Attendance at the event was down about 20% for the general ham population and probably about the same for the QRP crowd. But those of us who came sure had fun.

One of the high lights for me was having Dar Piatt from Omaha show up and surprise the heck out of me Friday night. I have been bugging Dar for years to come, and he always backs out. I thought he had again this year and was flabbergasted to see him show up. He and Darrel Swenson pulled one on me.

The Friday night no host banquet was again set up by our banquet chairman, Jim Duffey. We had some fabulous Mexican food at Balazos. Jim says that making the banquet arrangements is the easiest thing he does all year. The crowd gave him a nice ovation Friday night.

New things at Pacificon this year:

Vern Wright's Beam Antenna, Doug Hauff's Dirt Cheap Paddle and new mount, Hendricks QRP Kits BitX20A Case, MMR-40 Case, Bail Kit, NorCal's Power Meter and 2N2xx kits for 20, 30 and 40 meters. That is a lot of new stuff for one year. Elecraft was there and Eric reports that they are getting closer to getting caught up with their backlog.