I arrived back home on Tuesday after an overnight flight from Toronto on Air Canada. Overall I give Air Canada 5 out of 10 for the experience. Not the best, but certainly not the worst airline.
They really need to pay more attention to the little things that matter to passengers. It really is not acceptable to have non-working entertainment systems on transAtlantic flights, non-reset air progress maps on two flights and constantly interupting messages on top of movies, especially in two languages! It makes it a lot worse, guys.......
When I pay top rates for flights I expect at least a meal on the 2.5 hour Jazz flight between Toronto and Dallas. OK. Moan over. On the positive side the seats were comfortable and I'll probably travel AC again later this year. Ohh, and Toronto Pearson airport is very impressive!
So, to the conference.
A great success and all-thanks to the organisers for organising a wonderful event. I learnt a lot from the many experts that were around and the time spent with SM5SBZ was really useful.
I'm pleased to say that my pre-amps acquited themselves very well in the noise figure measurements. Although the numbers didn't always agree with my own measurements or with measurements made elsewhere in Europe, they were within the expected range.
The Proceedings for the Conference are a weighty tome. They are probably the biggest set produced for any EME conference to date! There is a CD available and that is probably the best bet for anyone wishing to obtain a set of material. The organising group for the Conference (NTMS) have said they will be posting all the slide presentations on their web page. This is a great idea and valuable for a subject like EME where the results of development may mean that results submitted to be published in the proceedings are already out of date by the time of the Conference.
Oh, I did buy the Flex1500. I'm looking forward to using it and to having a 10MHz locked SDR at last. I am now planning a frequency locked 2m transverter (and maybe other bands, in due course) to use with the Flex1500. I didn't buy very much else except another 23cm -20dB Narda coupler. My free door prize was a set of ATC 0.1 to 2pF chip capacitors and a few Minicircuit level 23 mixers. Maybe for that transverter? I also brought back some replacement PCBs for my 8970A noise figure meter. Hopefully, that will solve the problem. Fingers crossed!
With the Conference now over it is time to look forward to the next one. The 2010 Conference delegates voted for it to be in Cambridge, England, in 2012. The UKuG will set up a web page to keep everyone posted on progress and let you know when you can register for what we hope will be the best EME Conference ever. Dallas , Florence, Wurzburg etc will take some beating, however..........
Thanks to everyone who has been following the blog. I hope that you enjoy the next one as well.
73 de Sam
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