Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers

The SARA Western Conference met in Socorro, NM on March 17,18 & 19, 2017. We heard several presentations from SARA members, as well as presentations from Mark McKinnon, the Assistant Director for New Mexico Operations, Dr. Steven Myers, the lead for the Very Large Array Sky Survey project, and Dr. Greg Taylor from the University of New Mexico, principal investigator for the Long Wavelength Array project. We also sat in on a colloquium on pulsars given by Dr. Kevin Stovall of the University of New Mexico. The proceedings of the conference may be consulted for the detailed content of the presentations.

The keynote speaker for the 2017 conference is Dale Gary, Distinguished Professor in Physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), and Director of Solar Observatories. The latter includes the Big Bear Solar Observatory, an optical observatory in California with the highest-resolution solar telescope in the world, and also the Owens Valley Solar Array, a unique radio facility also in California dedicated to observing the Sun.

The 2016 SARA Western Conference was held on the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University campus a few miles outside of Prescott, Arizona USA over the weekend of 11~13 March. Ray Fobes was our host and he, Dave Westman, Keith Payea, and Lorraine Rumley worked hard to setup and manage the event.

HAMVention 2016 was another successful event for SARA. This is the second year that SARA has gone from a single stall to a double (as was done at the 4th USA Science & Engineering Festival earlier this year) with great success.