[hpsdr] Dayton Debrief

[Jeremy McDermond]

First off, I'd like to thank all the folks who made my Dayton trip possible.  I was very honored to be asked to speak, and I had a very good time doing so.  I hope it was educational for all involved.  Hopefully I can make it back next year.

I'd also like to say it was nice to meet John Melton, Rick, Dave, Scotty and the other TAPR folks during the Hamvention.  I hope John got back to England okay with the ash cloud issues.

All in all I thought the event went well.  All of us at the booth spent quite a while answering questions and chatting with folks.  I hope that we get some folks interested in the project and signed up on the reflector to chat about things.  There was a lot of interest in Hermes, not only from the people coming by the booth, but from me as well.  I didn't get a chance to see if I could get MacHPSDR to run on it, but John had ghpsdr running on it fairly well.  I think there's a couple of bugs to work out, but it seems fairly cool.  I just looked at the packaging of Hermes and thought to myself that it would be really really cool to be stuffed in a bag with my laptop for a portable SDR setup.  Too bad it won't be ready for Field Day :)  I didn't think that I'd be all that interested since I already have a Mercury/Penelope pair, but I have to say that I think I'm hooked.  It was interesting that the Hermes form factor was much like the Flex 1500 that was released at Hamvention.

The Flex presentation was very interesting, and it was educational to see some of their work in the commercial/government sector.  The big 32 receiver setups were cool looking.  Lyle's presentation on embedded SDR and the platforms to implement it put some interesting thoughts in my head, even if it isn't Mac stuff.  Scotty's presentation answered the question of Hamvention -- "Where's Alex."  John was very engaging, and we got along well.  I'm interested to connect with him more regarding the UI issues on a multi-receiver setup.  It's something that's been weighing on my mind as well.

I only got a brief opportunity to walk the show floor, and only ended up with a coax stripper from DX Engineering that I had been lusting after for a while, an Excalibur kit, and a Pennywhistle kit.  I'll have some kits to build when I get back to Oregon. :)

For folks that would like to look at the slides from my presentation, I posted them on my website at:

http://www.nh6z.net/MacHPSDR/Dayton_Presentation.pdf

Again, thanks to all who made Dayton possible for me, and I enjoyed meeting everyone that came.

--
Jeremy McDermond (NH6Z)
Xenotropic Systems
mcdermj at xenotropic.com