The huge Hamvention held at Dayton, Ohio in May each year must be known to most hams. Each year around 30,000 people attend the function where there are several hundred commercial stands under cover and 3000 car park places in the outdoor flea market. A group of Waverley members went to the 1999 Hamvention and are shown in the photo taken at the banquet on the Saturday night. They were
VK2ABU Morvan
VK2BEH Eddie
VK2RF Raffy and Ros
VK2TU Grant
VK2UA Simon and Janet
Contact was made with a number of US hams before and during the trip and relevant repeater information obtained for all areas to be visited. As would be expected, quite a number of purchases were made and below you can see members of the group including Eddie and Grant with very large parcels about to post them home. It some cases the postage was more than the cost of the goods! We are not sure why the person in the foreground is wearing one of the Waverley T-shirts designed by Raffy for the trip, as he is not part of our group! Apart from the Hamvention, Dayton does not offer much for the visitor with the exception of the USAF Museum at the Wright Patterson Air Base. A visit to this is a must for anyone with an interest in military aircraft and in addition there is a collection of all presidential aircraft since the time of Roosevelt.
As well as the visit to Dayton, the group also travelled to Chicago, Washington, New York and Boston with most returning home within a month. A few days were also spent in the historic countryside of Virginia where there is much to see relating to the Civil War period and earlier. In all these areas much use was made of handheld radios, mainly the diminutive Yaesu VX-R1s, to enable members of the group to keep in touch as well as to contact local hams. Simplex was used in areas when we were close, but in New York and Boston repeaters were effective over a large area. This must be due in part to the common US custom of having several widely spaced receivers for each repeater transmitter.
Apart from Dayton, one of the radio highlights was a visit to the USS Salem, CA139, at Quincy near Boston. This 17,000 ton cruiser was commissioned in 1949 and used to be the flagship of the US 6th Fleet in the 1950s. She was put into reserve in 1959 and in 1995 returned to Quincy where she was originally built and is now a museum ship. She has an active ham club on board, K1USN, and most of the ship's original radio and electronic equipment is still installed and working. For a tour of her radio spaces, maintained by "Brown" Beezer, W1NZR, visit the K1USN web site. The ham club occupies Radio Room 5 which never had a permanent installation as it was used for the current Flag Officer's personal communication equipment.