This past Saturday, I presented at the Microhams 2009 Digital Communications conference. I covered a basic demo of D-RATS functionality and showed the new 0.3.x UI I’m working on. Response was quite good and the questions I received were refreshingly technical and well thought out. Some new ideas came out of the discussions I had during and after the presentation, which I’m looking forward to working on. Overall I think it was the most interesting conference I’ve been to in a while, with just about every presentation keeping me interested the entire time.
In case you don’t know, the Microhams group is closely related to Microsoft, and (as I understand it) was founded and is largely populated by Microsoft employees. As such, the conference was held on the Microsoft corporate campus in Redmond, WA. I thoroughly enjoyed taking my Linux machine up to the podium (which sported a large brass-colored Microsoft logo) and plugging it into the projector. I got a couple of decent jabs at Microsoft worked into the material, and the audience was receptive to the fun.
As I was walking out to the parking area and waiting for Taylor to pick me up, I snapped the following shot of the posters that adorn the small-town-feel of the bit of the campus I was on:
I was amused 