While attending the Northwest ARRL convention in Seaside Oregon the first weekend of June, the owners of ICS-CTRL (Dan Loranger, KG7PAR and Joe Burkleo, WA7JAW) demonstrated the OpenRepeater 2.0.0 version to customers alongside their PI-Repeater family of products. ICS-CTRL is a proud partner and contributor of the OpenRepeater project and used this great opportunity to introduce the OpenRepeater software platform to thousands of attendees of various interest and technical ability levels. This ARRL convention commonly known as SEA-PAC (seapac.org) typically draws in approximately 2200 registered attendees over the duration of the 2 day event.
During the show, the ICS-CTRL booth was very busy with interested customers wanting to learn about the PI-Repeater family of controllers, and how the OpenRepeater software can be used to overcome the large learning curve of going from both the jump from Windows to Linux operating system, as well as getting a station on the air with the SVXLink platform. SVXLink has a vast amount of features and options that can be daunting to a newcomer. This interest continued even after the convention was completed and booths were being taken down and being packed away. The interest level from the attendees was impressive, and inspiring to the team at ICS-CTRL to continue their support for OpenRepeater as a valuable ham community resource.
While a full hour long seminar had been planned for this years event at SEA-PAC, the scheduling didn’t work out to allow this seminar to happen. This didn’t stop the educational opportunity though, it instead turned into a full 2 day series of impromptu seminars and Q&A sessions at the booth.
If you were not able to attend the SEA-PAC convention this year, the ICS-CTRL team is currently scheduled to attend the Nevada convention (NVCON.org) in Mid July, which is being held in Reno this year. In addition to attending the convention, they are also confirmed to be holding an hour long seminar on setting up a linux repeater which will be targeted at using the OpenRepeater software, and more in-depth information about the basic operation of SVXLink and some basic examples of how the system as a whole works. The ICS-CTRL team welcomes anyone interested to stop by for the seminar at NVCON, or just the booth with any questions, or just for a demonstration of the project.
The ICS-CTRL team makes it to several Oregon and Washington conventions each year, you can see their planned events on their website at https://ics-ctrl.com/events/.
