A television news producer from California; a DXpedition leader turned communications hero from India and a researcher from New Jersey have been selected as recipients of the 2005 Dayton Hamvention® awards.
Radio Amateur of the Year
Selected as Radio Amateur of the Year for his dedication to the ongoing education of radio amateurs to the many facets of their hobby and in the area of publicizing Amateur Radio to the non-licensed world through the mass media is Alan S. Kaul, W6RCL.
Alan Kaul is a career electronic journalist currently serving as a West Coast Producer for NBC Nightly News. A licensed radio amateur most of his life, he began his service to the hobby in the late 1970’s as a writer and reporter for the Westlink Amateur Radio News (the forerunner of today’s Amateur Radio Newsline).
One of the best remembered contributions to Newsline was his report on the death of His Majesty Al Hussein ibn Talal, JY1, King of Jordan. Working from an intimate knowledge of King Hussein and the monarch’s many ham radio friends Kaul wove a word picture of the man and his hobby, as seen through the eyes of those who knew him best. In 1983, as the first manned ham radio operation from orbit by Dr. Owen Garriott, W5LFL, was being planned Alan Kaul was tapped by the late Roy Neal, K6DUE, for a unique assignment. He would be the “volunteer” Producer of a half hour video about the flight to be titled “Amateur Radio’s Newest Frontier.” Shortly after the second version of this show was complete, Kaul accepted the assignment in Jordan and was gone for several years. While there, Alan filed a number of reports on ham radio in that region aired by Westlink Radio and later as Amateur Radio Newsline. These reports introduced the hobby as it is in the Middle East to radio amateurs world-wide. During that time, Kaul was on the air from across the region as JY9RL, operating mainly low power CW and bringing a number of rare locations on-the-air as time permitted.
After his return to Los Angeles, Alan became active in several worlds of Amateur Radio. Theses include QRP operation, CW operation and contesting to name only three. The latter led to his becoming a founding member of the Hollywood Hills QRP Contest Club in 2003. In 2002, Alan’s talent as a documentary writer/producer was tapped once again, this time by producer Dave Bell, W6AQ. He asked Alan to devise a concept for participation by legendary CBS Newsman Walter Cronkite, KB2GSD, to anchor a short presentation dealing with the reliability of ham radio during crisis situations. The project was eventually titled “Amateur Radio Today.” It was released by the American Radio Relay League in January of 2003. This video has since been used by the ARRL in its dealings with Congress and other legislators and received the Chicago Film Festival’s Certificate of Merit for a non-broadcast documentary later that year. Kaul’s latest video project, known by the working title “The ARRL Goes to Washington” is slated for release this spring. It documents the work being done on the political front by the ARRL to preserve the precious spectrum upon which radio amateurs operate and to protect it from interference by such entities as Broadband Over Powerline Internet access. He is also very active in publicizing other ham radio activities and produced a 3 minute report on Kids Day that aired nationally on NBC News.
Alan and his wife Christine live in La Canada, California. They have two children: A daughter Alexa and a son Ryan. (Information supplied by ARNewsline?)
Special Achievement Award – Special Achievement Award recipient D. Bharathi Prasad, VU2RBI, was on the air from the VU4RBI/VU4NRO DXpedition in Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands when disaster struck on December 29th.
A massive earthquake occurred at 00:58 UTC off the west coast of northern Sumatra. It measured 8.9 on the Richter scale and triggered a tsunami that took over 300,000 lives across the region. An IndiaNews report termed the destruction in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands ”unprecedented, with the gigantic tidal waves sinking two civilian ships and destroying dry docks.” After checking that everyone was safe and that the antennas were still on the roof, DXpedition team Prasad got back on the air and contacted HS0ZAA in Thailand and VU2UU and VU2MYL on the Indian mainland. Both confirmed the tremors at their locations. She then shifted the operation to handle emergency traffic and health-and-welfare inquiries between the island and the Indian mainland. Simultaneously, she sent team members to the office of the Chief Secretary, Government of Andaman & Nicobar Islands expressing the operators, willingness to support establishing an emergency communication network to assist the administration. For several days Prasad and the other DXpedition members were the lone voices on the radio bringing aid and comfort to the people of the isolated islands. Ironically, it was Prasad who organized the DX operation and worked to gain the special permission from India’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Department of Telecommunication to operate from the island chain. She says that she shares this honor with her fellow operators, with India’s National Institution of Amateur Radio, Hyderabad and India’s Dept. of Information Technology. (Information supplied by CQ Magazine, ARRL, ARNewsline, others)
Technical Excellence Award
Technical Excellence Award winner Dr. Jerry Sevick, W2FMI, is well known in ham radio technical circles world-wide for his many books, articles and other writings.
He earned a BS in education from Wayne State University and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard University and taught physics at Wayne State from 1952 to 1956. In 1956, Jerry joined the staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He supervised groups working in high-frequency transistor and integrated-circuit development, reliability, applications engineering and high-speed PCM. Later, he served as Director of Technical Relations and retired in 1985. It was his interest in Amateur Radio that launched Dr. Sevick into experiments with short vertical antennas and broadband matching networks. He is noted for a classic series on short vertical antennas that appeared in QST. His April 1978 QST article on short ground-radial systems now serves as the world’s standard for earth conductivity measurements. In the course of designing networks to match coaxial cable to short ground mounted vertical antennas, the transmission line transformer was looked at as a possible vehicle. He undertook the characterization and design of transformers for low impedance applications. This resulted in his book Transmission Line Transformers, published by the ARRL.
He also presented a series on baluns in Communications Quarterly and a series on ununs (unbalanced to unbalanced transformers) in CQ magazine. Dr. Sevick is a Technical Advisor for the ARRL and is a member of IEEE, Sigma Xi, Sigma Pi, Sigma and Phi Delta Kappa. He was a bomber pilot in World War II and was recently elected into Wayne State’s Athletic Hall of Fame for his record in football and track. (Adapted from www.bytemark.com with additional information from CQ Magazine)