In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, there are no Hamfests or Amateur Radio expeditions being held anywhere in 2020. As an alternative, there was an online QSO TODAY EXPO held on the weekend of the 8th & 9th of August 2020.
Some 26,000 people registered for the event with 14,000 attending online over the weekend.
My own interest in the event was the online talks and a full list is shown below. Each one was about 30 minutes in duration and covered a wide variety of topics. Over the EXPO weekend and the following week, I've probably watched about two-thirds of the videos on offer.
When the videos were streamed live, I found the feed would fail and I'd have to re-enter the talk again. This problem didn't happen when I looked at the recordings later so I presume it was a bandwidth issue during the EXPO weekend.
The videos could be described as useful primers on subjects that you might be interested in. They certainly weren't as detailed as say some videos on YouTube but many were entertaining and interesting all the same.
Many of the talks had the slides available as a downloadable PDF which is useful to refer to after the event.
There was a Q&A session after each talk although I had no idea how to access this and I really didn't take the effort to find out.
There were commercial booths with products online as well although I didn't bother looking at these. Still, with 14,000 plus visiting the site, I'm sure plenty probably did.
I suspect that in future, we're going to see a lot more online events like this even when the COVID-19 pandemic is over. It removes the need and expense of having to travel long distances.
Maybe these online EXPO's may not have everything that a real physical EXPO has but there's a lot to be said for being able to attend from the comfort of your own home.
The videos can be viewed until the 9th of September 2020.
Visit https://qsotoday.vfairs.com/
List of talks...
Keynote Address: COVID-19: Amateur Radio’s Impact On Problem Solving To Create A Global Response To The Pandemic
How to Solder - Steve Johnston, WD8DAS
