From 00:45 August 8 (5:45 August 7 local time), until August 9, I attended the QSO Today Ham Expo. This exposition was a virtual event on the Internet hosted on theVFair.com web site. There was quite a few sponsors of the event including the American Radio Relay League, ICOM, Gigaparts, RFinder, Flex Radio, RT Systems, Elecraft, and several others. There were others that did not have “booths.” I searched the parking lot for the tailgate hams, but could not find any.

I did get a chance to discover some organizations I did not know existed. One is Youth on the Air.

Some presentations in the form of videos may have been transferred to YouTube. Marcel Stieber AI6MS posted some of his QSO presentations on his YouTube page. He also has videos on ExamTools—a remote amateur radio licensing test system. His presentation on Fully-Remote Amateur Radio Exam Administration is well worth watching.

Ward Silver N0AX gave a good presentation on Bonding and Grounding. There are several videos with him on different amateur radio topics on YouTube.

I also liked the presentation of the CW Ops CW Academy. Eric Silverthorn NM5M gave a great brief on the four-stage program the academy offers. I received feedback from one student who really enjoyed their program. I hope to be able to take the course in the future.

The Exposition is closed now, but for the next thirty-days people who got tickets can still check in and watch, or re-watch, videos of the presentations. I do not know if you can now “sign up” and check in now that it is over.

Of course the Exposition is far from the fun of attending an actual convention. Conventions will no doubt return when COVID ends on November 5. I can see the VFairs platform being useful into the future, however. The QSO Today Exposition boasted over 26,000 and that will be difficult number to beat.

I was also able to hold a QSO with Bill KQ1S; a fellow member of the Coconino Amateur Radio Club. He discovered that there was a list of participants in the QSO Lounge and found me to start the QSO. There was no easy way to find a person at the Expo. If they did not go to the QSO lounge, you could not search for them. The QSO chat between Bill and me was through a Skype-like set up. The problem was you could not move it around the screen so you could see something else.

The Q&A sessions after the presentation were on Zoom. You could ask text questions, but chat, your video and audio were not functioning. That is understandable, of course, since you are not answering the questions. The Q&A sessions were recorded so I believe they are available