ON7DQ Friedrichshafen 2022 - Day 7

The Ham Radio !

The highlight of the trip is always the HamRadio, or at least it should be ...

I was disappointed at what was shown, or rather, what was NOT shown.
A large number of companies were not present (Kenwood, Yaesu, Elecraft, Wimo, Difona,  Begali ... the list goes on and on).  

But lets not focus on the negative ... look  who was waiting outside the door ... Phil, G4OBK, who I consider my mentor in all things SOTA. Phil helped me a lot with tips and tricks when I started SOTA in 2014. We had a nice chat while we waited until the queues at the entrance were gone.

I was lucky that at least one company hadn't given up on us : QRP Labs !

I picked up a QDX kit, and a hat and coffee mug that I ordered before.
It was nice to meet Hans "live" again, but time to chat was rather short ... many people were waiting in line, to worship their "God of QRP" ;-)

Here a few more pictures I took at the fair. 

Members of the High Speed CW Club at work 

While the main hall seemed rather empty, the flea market was (almost) as busy as always.

A nice magnetic loop by SV1FJF

A nice display from the Enigma Museum (see their website)

At noon, the QSL wall was the place to be for all SOTA activators and chasers.

Here some of the familiar (and famous) faces of the SOTA community ... 

Many more pictures can be found in this thread on the SOTA reflector

 

And of course at 14:00 there was the SOTA meeting in room "Österreich" (Austria).
This was the first time Sylvia, OE5YYN, could take here role as "organizer' of this meeting, after two years of Covid trouble ... It was good to see all these friends again.

Two presentations were given: a rather long one (hi) by Juerg HB9BIN and a shorter one by Ingo DH5ST. Slides from those presentations can be found here.

After the fair, we went across the street to the Zeppelin launch site (free parking at pos 47.674769, 9.507116), and watched the landing of a Zeppelin airship, it was quite impressive. I made a 6 minute video of the landing, send me an e-mail if you would like a copy of that video.
We didn't fly in a Zeppelin ... 280 Euros (times 2) for 20 minutes looked a bit too expensive. 

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