Even though I’ve been a ham almost 33 years, I had never been to the Dayton Hamvention. Here are some random thoughts on Dayton 2004:

Wet, tired, and happy, we all pose for a group picture before our return from Dayton.
Hey! Where’s Larry Reese?

As I reported last Saturday, after adding a set of 40m elements to the fan dipole in my backyard, I found I was actuating one of my garage door openers when transmitting on 40m. Not wanting to take the time to play with it, though, I’d just go into the garage and unplug the thing before getting on the air. Well, this afternoon, I decided to look into it further.

At last night’s ARROW meeting, we discussed strategies for getting a good deal at Dayton. Dave WB4SBE and Tom N8AMX had many good recommendations, both for getting deals and for dealing with the weather.

Today was just a fun day for playing with ham radio.

After working Paul AA1LL recently, I e-mailed him to follow up on a couple of things we’d discussed in our QSO. It turns out that Paul is an afficionado of simple keyer circuits, i.e. ones that do not use a microprocessor. Without a processor, you don’t get any memory, but the circuits are very simple to build.