WA8RRA at Spark in the Park 2017

On August 19th, Mike N8MRC, Roger K8BUU and Jay K8DC set up three tables at Spark in the Park (http://www.k8tb.org/sitp.htm), a science fair for amateur radio. Mike displayed several of his mobile HF antennas, which he was spotted removing from his car right before the show. Roger showed his homebrew reflow oven that he made for soldering surface-mount circuit boards. Jay brought a batch of circuit boards he designed, for building custom L-C filters using a network of surface-mount inductors and capacitors. Attendees were invited to select a filter designed using Elsie filter design software (http://www.tonnesoftware.com/elsie.html), build it using hot air to solder the SMDs and connectors, and measure their filter’s frequency response with Jay’s MiniVNA Tiny vector network analyzer (http://miniradiosolutions.com/54-2/) to compare the filter’s actual performance to the theoretical frequency response predicted by the software. And then they got to take their filter home as a free souvenir. Participation was pretty much non-stop during the whole event, including several kids who learned to solder for the very first time.