“There really doesn’t seem to be a very good modern equivalent to it,” he said. “We are, at heart, explorers in this world, but we’re exploring it through radio. Rather than hiking, rather than boating, rather than climbing ice, we explore the world through radio.”
Hamvention has been held annually since 1952, save for a two-year pause during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tom Blankenship, from the small northern Ohio village of Nevada, said he came to Hamvention looking for new equipment and to meet new people, including the stars of a few ham radio-related YouTube channels, who were in attendance.
“Recently, I’m looking at Morse code or CW (continuous wave),” he said. “If people (are) into ham radio, they really need to come here and see it, even if it’s just for a day. This is the place to be.”
Ticket sales for this year are expected to be on par with last year’s 35,000 attendees, who come from all over the world.
One such attendee is Seiji Fukushima, a professor of electronics engineering at Kagoshima University in Japan, and representing the Japanese Amateur Radio League. The league runs a contest, where Japanese and American radio operators connect to as many of the other nation’s radio stations as they can.
“Usually, the period is limited to 24 hours, 48 hours, and we have to make a lot of stations, as many as possible,” Fukushima said. “Communication is usually just 30 seconds. We have to exchange our call signs, and some of the small information, like where the radio signal is strong, something like that.”
Japan has a robust culture of amateur radio enthusiasts, Fukushima said. Ham radio has been used in the mountains of Japan during skiing or other outdoor activities, though its popularity has declined in recent years.
This year’s theme for Hamvention is “radio independence,” Markland said.
“It is derived from our First Amendment right to free speech,” he said. “It is very important that as a society, we’re able to communicate with one another. It’s how we get along. It’s how we work through our differences.”
Hamvention also works with local schools and children’s clubs, including 4-H and scouting groups, cultivating the next generation of hams.
In the era of social media, ham radio participation has declined, but the two have their parallels, Markland said, in finding the human messages underneath the noise.
“The noise in social media is the fringe. You have the loud voices, you have the sarcastic voices and all this,” he said. “In radio, all that noise started billions of years ago. It is cosmic background noise. On days when the sun is spitting out solar flares ... geological events, all of those things can affect the noise floor of the radio. You have to kind of listen through to find that voice, but oftentimes it’s that quietest voice on the other end, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t normally hear that. Let me see if I can talk to that.’”
Sunday is the last day of this year’s Hamvention, and the hours are 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. General admission tickets are $30 at the box office by the main entrance gate. Parking is at the Fairgrounds, or at Xenia High School, which is served by shuttle buses.
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