The Japan Ham Fair 2005 poster

Japan Ham Fair 2005

Last weekend, the large Japan Ham Fair 2005 was held at Tokyo's Big Sight (sic) Convention Centre.
Total attendance was up 2000 people over last year, with 16,000 on Saturday and 13,000 on Sunday.
I've collected a small photo gallery of some of the products, clubs, and events at the fair.

In the commercial exhibits, Icom, Kenwood, and Standard all had nice booths. Each had historical links, with Icom including a small collection of their rigs through the years. Icom was featuring the new IC-7000 and their D-Star products.

Kenwood showed off the computer and remote control features of their TS-2000 and TS-480 rigs. The FT-9000 series and a prototype of a new FT-2000 transceiver due out next year were the stars of the Yaesu section of the Standard booth.

Alinco showed their mobile rigs, handhelds, and accessories. Comet, and Diamond were each showing new generations of limited space antennas. Radix had their own take on small antennas, and FR Radio Labs was again showing EH "Activator" antennas for 160 through 6 meters.

Tokyo Hy-Power had quite a number of new amplifier and antenna tuner products. Their new HC-100AT 1.8~54MHz automatic antenna which can tune with as little as 1.5W (and handle up to 100W) may be of interest to QRP fans. They also have a HC-1KAT auto- tuner for the high power group.

Namics was showing a conductive paste pen that you draw on Vector board and then bake 10 minutes with an electric skillet or toaster oven to set. A quick way to put together a one-of-a-kind circuit board.

As usual, the JARL QRP Club had a number of interesting homebrew projects on display. Perhaps the most fun were the "1000 Yen rig" challenge, putting together a rig for about US$9. There were also a number of milliwatt rigs in the "eco" class for racking up big km/Watt numbers.

Among the interesting presentations was a talk by Victor Goonetilleke, 4S7VK, the president of the Radio Society of Sri Lanka, about their experiences in tsunami disaster relief communications. JA3ELR also drew a large crowd for his QRP talk.

Japan Ham Fair 2005 Photo Gallery

Jim Tittsler 7J1AJH/AI8A
Tokyo, JAPAN
EchoLink: *TIARA* Conference

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