The ARRL Board granted several awards at its July 2021 meeting.

• The ARRL Doug DeMaw, W1FB Technical Excellence Award went to Steve Franke, K9AN; Bill Somerville, G4WJS, and Joe Taylor, K1JT for their July/August 2020 QEX article, “The FT4 and FT8 Communications Protocols.” The DeMaw award honors the author of an article or article series judged to possess the highest degree of technical merit in ARRL periodicals for the past year.

• John Levo, W8KIW, of Hillsboro, Ohio, was designated as the recipient of the 2021 ARRL Philip J. McGan Memorial Silver Antenna Award. This award honors a Public Information Officer who successfully promotes all aspects of Amateur Radio that enhance the understanding of Amateur Radio’s contributions to education, public safety, and recreation. The Board said Levo’s efforts over time have captured “the many avenues of opportunities of Amateur Radio as a hobby, an education tool, and a service for public safety.”

• The 2021 ARRL Technical Service Award 2021 award recipient is James Baxter, KØUA, of Branson, Missouri. The Board said Baxter “exemplifies the spirit of this award due to his diligent work assisting hundreds of hams get on the air, particularly with FT8, and by spending countless hours on web sessions with them to work out their configuration issues, show them best practices, and to help track down RFI issues.”

• The Board bestowed the 2021 ARRL Technical Innovation Award on Steve Haynal, KF7O; Wojciech Kaczmarski, SP5WWP, and Roger Clark, VK3KYY. Haynal was cited as the instrumental and driving force behind the Hermes Lite 5 W HF SDR transceiver as a fully open-source hardware and software project. Kaczmarski was recognized for developing the open-source digital radio communication protocol M17, leading to the development of DroidStar (an Android application) by Doug McLain, AD8DP. Clark was cited for spearheading a successful effort to augment a low-cost handheld radio for use by visually impaired operators, significantly lowering the cost of entry for such amateurs.

• The 2021 Herb S. Brier Instructor of the Year Award went to David Ritter, ND4MR. ARRL sponsors this award in conjunction with the Lake County Indiana Amateur Radio Club in Brier’s memory to recognize superior Amateur Radio instruction and recruitment. An ARRL Member for nearly 40 years, Ritter is an ARRL Registered Instructor and a full-time faculty member at Wilkes Community College in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, where he’s been the lead — and sole — Technician licensing course instructor since 2010.