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The weekend before last was the 2009 Dayton Hamvention. I'm a week late crafting this write-up because of some work-related travel that came up unexpectedly last week. It was a good show, but it seemed clear that the poor economy had taken its toll on the attendance. Luckily the level of interest in D-STAR has increased since last year, so there was a higher relative concentration of people interested in D-STAR and D-RATS than before. As a result, I still had a fairly large amount of traffic and questions. D-RATS had a much larger presence this year than last, with a large booth on the arena floor: There were four computers, one on each end connected to a large display screen and two in the middle for hands-on demonstration. The right-most machine was connected to the internet and the ratflector for most of the show, which allowed people to chat with foreign stations and see their positions on the map:
I was also really glad to have a few visitors from back home, some of which manned the booth for me so I could get out to see the rest of the show:
From left to right: Rob N1KEZ, John KX7YT,myself, and John N7AAM. Update 27-May-2009: I forgot to post a link to the D-RATS flyer that was available at the show. You can get the PDF version here.
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