The Ottawa Amateur Radio Club (OARC) hosted a booth at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2025 International Symposium on Antennas & Propagation and North American Radio Science Meeting (AP-S/URSI 2025), 13-18 July 2025 at the Rogers Centre, 55 Colonel By Drive in Ottawa.

AP-S/URSI 2025 offered unique insights into emerging technologies related to antennas, propagation, and radio science. Traditionally, this flagship event attracts over 1,600 attendees from more than 30 countries, including delegates from industry, academia, and government and the next generation of engineers and researchers. Read more below about the OARC’s Amateur Radio booth.

Our people at the booth

The OARC booth was staffed over the five days of the conference by Wayne VE3CZO, Paul VE3ICV (who was also the IARU rep), Mike VE3FFK, Greg VE3YTZ, and Connor VA3ZCB. Visitors to the booth were more or less continuous throughout the conference, with a total of approximately 100 people coming by. Many people stayed for lengthy conversations.

Equipment on display and demos

Our booth was located in the middle of the building and running coax would have been difficult. We suspect that the noise floor would also have been very high in downtown Ottawa. We solved this by using remote radios.

We had two laptops, one on each table, each with an associated remote radio. One laptop was connected over the Internet to an ICOM 7300 located at Scout Headquarters, VE3SHQ, and the other was connected to a FLEX 6500 located at RAC Headquarters, VE3RHQ. Each laptop was also running HamClock through a web browser (rather than running it in a Linux window).

Wayne, VE3CZO, brought his light link and a couple of headsets. That was very popular with the attendees. He also brought a 2.4GHz Yagi and that certainly was something that was noticed by many that came through.

Greg, VE3YTZ, suggested an FT8 station be set up. In fact, there was one set up with the Flex 6500 but there were challenges getting it up and running. The computer was running Windows 11 and it was slow to boot up and kept crashing. We did have one person use the CW feature and he made 17 contacts over the three days.

List of all equipment on display

Lively conversations

Many lively conversations were had at the booth. As always, the challenge was to describe a hobby that covers so many different things. Mike, VE3FFK, said we should emphasize our penchant for independence from infrastructure, such as:

• a preference for using the ionosphere rather than satellites or Internet, although both are part of the picture;
• a bias toward 12V power inputs vs commercially available mains, although typically we use line voltage power supplies most of the time; and
• wide interest in outdoor operations such as Parks On The Air (POTA), Field Day, etc., and interest in solar power, “power stations” (battery-inverter combos), LiFePO4 batteries.

A number of attendees were interested in millimeter wave (mmWave), which involves using very high frequency radio waves, typically between 30 GHz and 300 GHz, for communication and experimentation. These frequencies offer advantages like a large amount of bandwidth and the ability to use smaller antennas, but also come with challenges like limited range and susceptibility to atmospheric conditions.

Many who stopped by asked first about 23 to 40 GHz and our reply was to point out that Amateur Radio has access to frequencies from 137 kHz to 250 GHz. Then Harrie, VE3HYS, would point to the light link and this would usually start a conversation.

Harrie also ended up in long conversations at separate times with two American amateurs, technician class, who had done nothing or very little since getting their licence. Hopefully seeing things in the booth and talking about all the different types of emissions and things one can do in the hobby sent them home with renewed interest.

Visual elements

The visual elements of the booth included banners for OARC, Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC) and International Amateur Radio Union (IARU); six posters provided by the American Radio Relay League (see below), and a Yaesu World Map with callsigns. We also had a 43” Samsung TV with a video promoting Amateur Radio from Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB) and a RAC 36-second clip, all playing in a loop.

Conference giveaways

Throughout the conference, we gave away the following items, which we hoped would be interesting or useful to conference attendees:

• Bookmarks: Bright red bookmarks with the phonetic and Morse Code alphabets on one side and a QR code on the other that took you to an OARC web page with our four booth themes (click to see our four booth themes lower down on this page), and
  
• Paper copies of two magazines :
  • The Canadian Amateur (TCA) from RAC, and
  • QST magazine from ARRL.

We gave away approximately 90 book marks and about 20 copies of the magazines.

Photo Gallery

What were the four themes at the booth?

The OARC booth demonstrated how Amateur Radio is relevant to IEEE AP-S/URSI attendees under the following four themes:

We thank ARRL for the use of these six terrific posters at the booth.

Click here to download the ARRL posters for your own use.

Last Updated on 2025-08-12 by Joannadanna