Sunday February 26, 2017. Maui, HI Jim Andrews, KH6HTV and Alan Maenchen, KH6TU (AD6E) at the Queen Kaahumanu center on Sunday, Feb 26th from 10am – 3 pm for the Maui Engineering Day. Jim will be demonstrating his high definition digital TV amateur radio system. Alan and Jim had setup an operating display of amateur radio 70cm digital TV system at the Maui engineering day. It was the main, initial attention getter. The sign in front of the video monitor read “LIVE AMATEUR DIGITAL TV — longest distance with this equipment. 77 MILES !” Alan and Jim also had a 100W SSB/HF radio (Yaesu FT-857) on the table as an introduction to talk about our short wave, world-wide communication capability. The sign in front of the rig read “100 Watt Short-Wave RADIO — World-Wide Communication” Also Alan had on his tablet a photo of his Step-IR HF beam antenna on a 70ft. crank up tower to show what a good HF antenna consisted of. Jim also had on display some of his 23cm, FM-TV gear with the covers off showing the stuffed PC boards with 100s of SMD components. The sign for these read “Examples Home-Built Radio & TV equipment” They also had the ARRL banner, Joe, AH0A, supplied as a back-drop to the display table. On the table, we had an assortment of ARRL literature to give away. They had some interested visitors to the table. However, the vast majority of the attendees to the engineering day fair were elementary school age children with their parents. Most all of the other engineering organizations at the fair had interactive construction games for the kids to play. They were definitely aimed at the under 10 years of age crowd and were a hit with the kids. For us, the only thing which interested these young kids was acting up in front of the TV camera and watching themselves on the monitor. Jim stated; “Our target audience with our message was really not young children, but high school and college age kids of which there was very few. We did have a few interested adults stop by and want to chat at length. A few of them asked if their were any classes being taught on Maui to get a ham license. Unfortunately, we had to admit the answer was no, but MARC did give license exams a couple each year. A couple of adults wanted consulting on how to make telemetry and video surveillance systems work on ham frequencies. We had to tell them that for their particular applications, they were money making, business related, and as such were illegal to do on amateur frequencies.” A key contact made was when with Jayson Kohama, WH6BXK, dropped by the table. Jason is a radio tech with the Maui Police. He was extremely interested in the display of 70cm, hi-def, digital TV. He said he could see very definite applications for it within the police dept. Jm promised to email to him copies of the power-point slide presentations that he gave last month in Honolulu. This event supported the ARRL’s STRATEGIC PLAN 2016-2020 by supporting two of the six goals. -GOAL 1: Grow Amateur Radio worldwide. -GOAL 4: Advance Amateur Radio science and technology. http://www.mauisciencecenter.com/2017/01/engineering-day-2017-queen-kaahumanu-center/ https://oahuarrlnews.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/engineering-day-2017-queen-kaahumanu-center/
