Steve
Thanks for the update. A thought re your comment that
"The bad news is that the Hamvention continues its attendance slide."
This is a trend, particularly since 9/11, seen in conventions/conferences in
the business world as well. Many articles in the business press have
addressed the substantial downturn in the travel and convention/conference
industries which actually started several years ago. Speculation is that
part of the downturn is due to the growing effectiveness of the INTERNET at
facilitating information exchange (TowerTalk is an example). Even more
powerful, real time approaches exist via WebEx and competitors to it. You
could give your 'tower mistakes' talk for free on PlaceWare
(http://www.placeware.com/ a WebEx competitor) and perhaps attract a larger
audience. Webinars (a contraction of the words 'Web' and 'Seminars') are
offered free by PlaceWare.com to the business world by as a way to introduce
their service to prospective customers.
While I suspect there are many other reasons contributing to the Dayton
attendance slide that are related the overall drop in active hams, I just
wanted to observe that the emergence of Internet forums may better meet some
of our needs because they are lower in cost, consume less time, and are more
readily accessible (e.g. I can get year round access to expert
advice/information via TowerTalk) vs. the once per year "drink from a fire
hose" approach of Dayton.
Of course, the Internet is not yet a substitute for physically seeing new
product offerings up close at discounted prices or for attending the flea
market.
73 de Jim WA6PXU@ARRL.net
-----Original Message-----
From: towertalk-admin@contesting.com
[mailto:towertalk-admin@contesting.com]On Behalf Of K7LXC@aol.com
Sent: Friday, May 17, 2002 7:00 PM
To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: [Towertalk] First day at Dayton
Howdy, TowerTalkians --
It was nice running into some of you today at the Hamvention. First the
good news.
Interesting new stuff including seeing the new AN tower at the Array
Solutions booth. It's a commercial grade self-supporter. Pretty brute stuff
and should take any kind of load like a 10' microwave dish which it looks
like it was designed for.
The owner of Pro-Sistel was also at the A/S booth. Very nice and sincere
guy so his relationship with Array Solutions may be successful for everyone.
Also in the A/S booth was the designer and a version of the OptiBeam. It
sounded interesting. It'd be nice if someone were to test one of them and
publish the results.
Rich, K0XG, was there with his rotating tower products and he pointed
out
that he has a beam boom mount that'll fit on a 45G or 55G tower leg. It also
has a strut that prevents any beam movement so the torque on the leg is
minimized but the strut allows fine tuning so you can get the antenna
pointed
in the desired direction accurately and easily.
The K3LR Antenna Forum had REALLY interesting programs by K1ZM on his
new
VY2/Prince Edward Island station that has his dream 160M vertical set-up.
Mike, W9RE, had the story of his 2L 80M beam. It's big, it's heavy, and they
designed/homebrewed the whole thing. They even assembled it on the tower
since the soil was too wet for a crane. VERY impressive.
The bad news is that the Hamvention continues its attendance slide. You
can get a room anywhere in town right now including the Crown Plaza which is
a first. The Hertz rental place at the airport said rentals were down 40%
and
you could walk right into the Spaghetti Warehouse across the street from the
CP on Friday night and get seated immediately - that's NEVER happened
before.
The wx is also crappy - rain and 50 degrees.
More news tomorrow. I'll hit the flea market (2-1/2 acres!) then but
will
have to buy an umbrella first.
Cheers,
Steve K7LXC
TOWER TECH
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