ON7DQ Friedrichshafen 2026 - Day 7

At the HAM RADIO Fair

I had only bought a ticket for the Saturday at the fair, so I was at the entrance at 09:00 to get the most of it. There was a long queue, but we were able to get in quickly.

I did my usual round, first the flea market, then the main hall A1, and in the afternoon I also briefly visited ASTRO, the trade fair for astronomy.

The flea market is shrinking in size every year ... this is the first hall, still looking full, but the tables are much wider apart than before. Well, It has the advantage that you don't have to squeeze between rows of people.

The second hall looked almost empty. Even an an additional partition wall couldn't hide the fact that maybe next year, one hall will be enough for the flea market.

Someone was selling digital thermometers, always good to know t was 27.3°C there, hi.

A few other iterms that caught my attention ...

In the main hall were the usual exhibitors, but also here quite a lot of companies are no longer coming to the Ham Radio. The main attraction is of course the SOTA stand !

For those that follow the SOTA Reflector, or have read the previous pages of this report, you will have noted that one of the most talked about items in 2026 is the Hourglass Antenna. There is a lot of interest in this small & light antenna for horizontal polarisation. It enables 2m CW/SSB operation with little effort, so as to participate in this years' 2m/70cm CW & SSB Challenge.
At the SOTA stand , Roman DL3TU was promoting a double version of the Hourglass Antenna.

A suprise at the SOTA stand was meeting Martin, DK3UW. Martin has nothing to do with SOTA, but he's one of the regular participants in the QCX Challenge and the QCX WARC Party. So I have one or more QSO's with Martin every two weeks or so.

ON7DQ                       DK3UW

In the afternoon was the traditional SOTA meeting, where Joe, OE5JFE explained some fine details of the Ham2k PoLo logging app. I'm using this app for some time now, but I still learned a few new tricks. Thanks Joe!

ASTRO

A visit to this astronomy fair was comprised in the Ham Radio ticket. I didn't have much time left so it was a short visit. I'm not really into astronomy, but there was an impressive display of telescopes and everything related. 

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