Hi!

I was at the Scottsdale Amateur Radio Club's "Springfest" hamfest this morning, with an AMSAT table. This is one of the larger hamfests around the Phoenix area in the unofficial hamfest "season" - basically, anytime that isn't summertime. :-) After a light rain last night in parts of the Phoenix area, the weather was perfect this morning, and there was a great turnout. As with most hamfests around Arizona, this one started before sunrise, and wrapped up by midday.

Satellite passes were not the best for the hamfest this morning. I was able to do some demonstrations early - FO-29 around 6am (1300 UTC), and SO-50 an hour later. I made one QSO on the FO-29 pass, with Yuri UT1FG/MM (as did many others on that pass). On SO-50, seven QSOs went in the log. The ISS pass around 1600 UTC was a good one - I could see my packets being retransmitted, but no QSOs were logged. Thanks to everyone who worked WD9EWK during those passes - especially to UT1FG/MM, whose unique call is nice to hear during the demonstrations. These QSOs have been uploaded to Logbook of the World, and - as I do with any of these events - I would be happy to send you a QSL card to confirm our QSO. Please e-mail me directly with the QSO details, so I can check that against my log. If you're in the log, I'll send out a card - no SASE needed.

Being able to talk up the upcoming Fox-1 series of satellites has been a very good thing. The Fox project has been around since late 2009, but there is more interest from the ham community when launch dates can be given, instead of "in the future" or "real soon now". I was even able to talk about my portable SDR setup using a USB dongle (both the FUNcube Dongle Pro+ and the cheaper "RTL-SDR" dongles) and the smaller Windows 8.1 tablets. One ham couldn't believe that the small tablets could do this, so I set up one of my Windows 8.1 tablets (the WinBook TW800, which has been retailing at $79) and the FUNcube dongle (it works well as the receiver when working our satellites) to prove the point. The ham already had an RTL-SDR dongle, and said he was going to order the tablet.

That's it for this morning's hamfest. I will be at another hamfest next Saturday morning in Tucson AZ, complete with an AMSAT table and hoping to do more demonstrations for the hamfest crowd there.

73!

Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK http://www.wd9ewk.net/ Twitter: @WD9EWK