Trip Report

ARRL Northwestern Division Convention

Seaside, Oregon – 6-7 June 2009

By David Sumner, K1ZZ

This was my second trip to Seaside, the first being in 2004. I left from Boston to get a good fare at convenient travel times, and flew on Thursday (staying Thursday night in Portland) in order to arrive in time for a Friday night social event (spaghetti supper at a firehouse). Seaside is a 90-minute drive west of Portland, which required a rental car.

The spaghetti social is a joint venture of the Sunset Empire Amateur Radio Club (SEARC) and the Seaside Tsunami Amateur Radio Society (STARS). STARS is a new club that has just applied for ARRL affiliation. Its emphasis is on mentoring new hams, particularly for emergency communications (Seaside is in a tsunami zone and the locals take alerting and evacuation very seriously). A couple of hundred people were there when we were, and others had been and gone before we arrived. I enjoyed conversations with, among others, the attendee who beat me out for the distinction of having come the farthest, Glyn, GW0ANA, and his host Frank, KB7NJV. Frank is a municipal judge in the state capital of Salem.

The ARRL stand at Seaside is in the lobby of the Convention Center. Director Jim Fenstermaker, K9JF was in the midst of moving and was unable to bring his usual complement of ARRL display material, but no one had trouble finding us. Jim, his wife Shirley, W7SAF, Vice Director Bill Sawders, K7ZM, Bill’s wife Vicki, K7VKI, and several other volunteers did a great job covering the booth. The Convention Center was right across the street from my hotel, the Inn at Seaside, so I was able to stay connected to their WiFi network and made good use of the ARRL Web site; for some reason, several members wanted to check their membership expiration date. W1AW/7 was operated across the lobby from the ARRL stand; they didn’t set any records but provided a couple of hams with their first opportunity to make HF QSOs.

On Saturday morning I spent more than an hour in a private discussion with four SMs: Mark Tharp, KB7HDX (EWA), Jim Pace, K7CEX (WWA), Bonnie Altus, AB7ZQ (OR) and Bill Hillendahl, KH6GJV (SF). I have passed my notes along to Harold Kramer and Dave Patton for followup as appropriate. I think it was time well spent. The SMs seemed to appreciate the face time. Mark, who is active on the SM “private reflector,” kept checking his notes and said all of the concerns expressed there recently had been covered.

The ARRL Forum lasted 90 minutes on Saturday afternoon. Jim, K9JF brought members up to date. He asked me to cover HR 2160. I also did a presentation about the FCC BPL redactions.

The banquet Saturday night was well attended; I didn’t think to count heads but there were more than 200. I did my “Not Your Grandfather’s Ham Radio” presentation as the warm-up act for the main speaker, a Portland TV and radio personality who was very entertaining and worked in a couple of good ham radio references.

Sunday morning was a bit slower than Saturday, which gave me the chance to visit a few of the exhibitors. They seemed very pleased with the weekend’s traffic and business. There were about 40 exhibitors and 2200 attendees, both figures comparable to recent years. Jim and Shirley invited me to dinner at their Vancouver, WA home before my red-eye flight Sunday night back to Boston.

My overall impression is that Amateur Radio is pretty healthy in the Northwest, the principal positive influences being (1) an awareness of our role in emergency communications resulting from recent serious storms and flooding, and (2) the LDS Church, which is an active sponsor of licensing classes. The evident challenges are similar to other areas: organizational and regulatory issues relating to emergency communications, socialization of new licensees, and the need to persuade them that ARRL membership is relevant and valuable to them. From what I observed, when it comes to socialization and mentoring of newcomers the Northwest is doing pretty well, which may help explain the growth in membership in the Northwestern Division (currently running second only to Rocky Mountain).

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