05 September 2021

This weekend has been spent staring at Zoom. Normally this would suck 
but this weekend happens to be the GQRP convention weekend. If you are 
interested in building radio bits then you really should join the 
GQRP. It is the best value society I have joined. The UK membership 
price is just Â6 a year and you get 4 copies of the society magazine 
delivered to your address. It is a welcoming organisation with plenty 
of patient members to help any newcomers to the hobby pick up the 
construction bug. I have been helping in the background resolve Zoom 
issues and hosted one of the many talks. The subjects have varied from 
the introduction level through to detailed technical updates. We have 
750 attendees from 36 different countries attending the convention. I 
have found myself looking to do some antenna building again. Some of 
my barriers of reluctance to build a SSB transceiver have been knocked 
down through the brilliant examples of not worrying over PCBs etc. Get 
some ugly builds done and forget the perfect bits! 

The talks covered:

construction techniques,
RF test equipment (both use and making your own),
designing rigs through measurement,
antenna construction,
valve construction,
EMF exposure assessments,
using surface mount components,
operating on mountain tops,
antenna modelling,
techniques for operating QRP

Not bad for an event which is free to members! People who signed up 
as members for the event got 6 months of membership for free too. 

Note, my arms still ache from climbing! The back and legs are not 
aching though.