Our September Meeting – SWR: Who Cares?
Kristen McIntyre, K6WX
The Desert RATS September meeting will be on the 15th at 7:00 p.m.. and conducted by Zoom, and will feature a presentation by Kristen McIntyre, K6WX.
Standing Wave Ratio has long been a boogieman in ham radio. Some make it the defining parameter of their station efficiency and performance. But why do we care? Does it have a role in designing our stations? Let’s explore in some depth what SWR is and what it tells us and whether it really defines our station.
Kristen McIntyre, K6WX, has been interested in radio since she was about 5 years old. She started in Amateur Radio in 1979 getting her ticket while at MIT. Kristen has worked in many diverse areas from analog circuit design to image processing to starting and running an ISP. She is currently working at Apple in Core Networking and spent many years at Sun Microsystems Laboratories where she was researching robustness and emergent properties of large distributed computer systems. She is a long-time denizen of Silicon Valley and has worked at or consulted for many of the usual suspects. Kristen is an active ham and loves to chase DX on HF with her Elecraft K2 which she built while visiting her mother in Florida. She is ARRL Pacific Division Vice Director, former president of the Palo Alto Amateur Radio Assoc., the Q&A columnist for Nuts and Volts magazine and is active in many local clubs. Kristen was inducted into the CQ Amateur Radio Hall of Fame in 2017.
To attend the presentation, you will need to download and install the Zoom app, available here. We will be sending out a link to the meeting the day before – simply click on the link to attend the meeting.
