[TenTec] Merger

[Stuart Rohre]

I just heard a talk, post Dayton, by one of the ARRL vice Directors. 
ARRL is hopeful for this merger to work to the benefit of hams, and for 
CQ to emerge from its restructuring as a viable magazine.  CQ appeals to 
a segment of ham radio, (contests) that varies from the ARRL contest 
participants with some overlap.  But CQ magazine devotes more in their 
magazine to their sponsored contests and those of overseas sponsors.

ARRL records show a steady growth in new hams, and League membership 
grows as new hams enter the hobby.  Recent and  younger ham retention is 
a big topic at the League, and stimulation of further interest in the 
hobby; especially among the young and middle age "Makers" is also a big 
topic.  The league has an active youth component at each large 
convention, with a special subset of their booth devoted to that.  It 
seemed to be well attended at Ham Com in greater Dallas, (Plano) last year.

The league has furnished seed money to stimulate Broadband Ham Net (tm), 
the up and coming digital and microwaves revolution in ham emergency 
communications.  This is based on Mesh networking, where a spread out 
community of hams can provide multiple paths across a city that suffers 
phone outages, or overload.  Hamnet can simultaneously transmit the ARRL 
Handbook text in 2 minutes,  while supporting a VOIP phone system and 
live video from an incident scene.  In other words, it has more 
bandwidth,than packet like systems could ever dream of.

That might be a technical area that no commercial manufacturer is 
directly serving.  Hams are presently cobbling together systems from 
other commercial wideband antenna hardware and network boxes such as 
Linksys surplus routers.  New work and software has appeared for off the 
shelf "at the antenna" routers such as the Bullet devices.  A vendor who 
can serve the ham's questions and package a turn key "Kit"
would be offering something no other ham supplier has attempted.

-Stuart Rohre
K5KVH