10. Rub shoulders with 25,000 of your best friends at the largest hamfest in the United States, including six of the seven AMSAT Directors and all of the AMSAT senior officers.
9. Find out how to organize a contact with the astronauts on the International Space Station for your local school or youth group from our Education and ARISS experts.
The eighth annual AMSAT/TAPR Banquet will be held on Friday night, May 16. This dinner is always a highlight of the AMSAT (Radio Amateur Satellite Corp.) and TAPR (Tucson Amateur Packet Radio) activities during the Dayton Hamvention.
This year’s speaker will be Dr. Tom Clark, K3IO, “Sixty Years a Slave (to Amateur Radio).”
Tom received his Ph.D. in Astro-Geophysics from the University of Colorado, served as Chief of the Astronomy Branch at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, was a Senior Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, has been active in both AMSAT and TAPR, and holds an Extra Class license. Along with Bob McGwier, N4HY he developed the first amateur DSP hardware, including a number of modems. He developed the uplink receivers and the spacecraft LAN architecture used on all the Microsats (Oscars 16, 17, 18, 19, 26, 27 and 31). Tom was inducted into the initial class of CQ Magazine’s Amateur Radio Hall of Fame in 2001. Professionally, he is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Society and the International Association of Geodesy. In 2005 he was the first non-Russian to be awarded the Special Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences for his contributions to the international Very Long Baseline Interferometry network.
The weekly broadcast of the Amateur Radio Newsline interviewed AMSAT President Barry Baines, WD4ASW at the Dayton Hamvention about the Fox-1 cubesat and the current situation in working with ITAR regulations. This is included in Amateur Radio Newsline Report 1868, dated May 31 2013 and carried on-the-air during many nets and amateur radio news reports. Here is a transcript of the interview with Barry, titled, “HAMVENTION 2013: PART 2 – WRAPPING IT UP”, by Amateur Radio Newsline’s Stephan Kinford, N8WB:
“While most tend to report on the Dayton Hamvention based on number of attendees and new equipment released or at least previewed, there is a lot more to this annual gathering. This is also a place where breaking news is first reported and according to AMSAT North America President Barry Baines, WD4ASW, hams involved in space communications had at least two things to smile about. The first was the announcement of a launch commitment for one of the group’s newest birds.
NASA announced Monday that AMSAT’s Fox-1 spacecraft has been assigned a launch in 2014. For details on the launch vehicle, targeted launch date, orbit specifics, and more, please attend the AMSAT Forum and visit the AMSAT booth at the Dayton Hamvention this weekend. Watch www.amsat.org and the AMSAT News Service for more details to follow as they become available.