Our First Hamvention

Hamvention to hams is like Mecca to Muslims. You should make the trip at least once. I had asked Theresa KG4TVM if she
wanted to honeymoon at Hamvention back in 2003 but she said no. This year, it was a birthday present from her to me.

We stayed at a state park cabin about 30 miles away from Hamvention at a place called Cowan Lake State Park. We arrived a day early and activated the park and
nearby wildlife area for POTA. We did not park at Hamvention; we parked at the high school and took a school bus to the site.
The town cancels school for Hamvention so there was plenty of parking and a number of perky high school students.

Hamvention is a huge event. There were 37,924 attendees from over 43 countries and there were over 600 volunteers.

Despite the huge number of people, we ran into a lot of people from the OVH. Jay NQ4T was part of a group with 4 tailgate spaces and easy-ups for shelter.
Jay invited us to sit and it was a nice place to stop and visit. We also ran into Mark WA4KFZ, Bill N4SV and Bill AF4LL. We ran into Jeff K9VEG as he was manning the CW Ops booth. Rob KR4EEV was at Hamvention but we did not run into him.

We understand from Jay that it always rains at Hamvention and it did rain on Saturday. However, we did not have a sea of mud that has happened other years. Theresa stayed at Jay’s booth while I toured the tailgate area while it rained a bit. The most interesting thing that we bought was a HT antenna so flexible that you can tie it in a lose knot and it will be fine. We bought two that glow in the dark.

Theresa and I also spent some time at the POTA tent. They had “POTA BINGO” and we played it. It was a bingo card filled with things that can happen on a pota activation and found a person that had done that and they filled in the square with their callsign. Only one callsign per card. When your card was complete, you were eligible to put your name and call in for a prize drawing. Neither of us won anything but it was a fun icebreaker. There are pictures of our Bingo cards in the slide show at the end of this article.
Thanks to Theresa for a very nice birthday present.