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.
