The Yasme Foundation Board of Directors has announced five Excellence Awards and one supporting grant for 2017. The Yasme Excellence Award is presented to individuals and groups who, through their own service, creativity, effort, and dedication, have made a significant contribution to Amateur Radio. Their contribution may recognize technical, operating, or organizational achievement. The Yasme Excellence Award consists of a cash grant and an individually engraved crystal globe.

Receiving Yasme Foundation Excellence Award were:

Dayton Amateur Radio Association (DARA): To pick up the nation’s largest Amateur Radio event — Hamvention® — on a few months’ notice and move it to a completely different facility is a daunting task. That it went so smoothly was a testament to the extraordinary efforts of the 600 volunteers and event leadership.

Paul Verhage, KD4STH, and Bill Brown, WB8ELK: For their leadership and continued technical innovation in Amateur Radio high-altitude ballooning (ARHAB). While not the traditional means of introduction, ARHAB is exposing hundreds of students to Amateur Radio through an interest in science experimentation. Both honorees have written extensively about ARHAB and have contributed material to The ARRL Handbook.

Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF, and Magda Moses, KM4EGE: For creating and leading the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) organization that sponsored the Solar Eclipse QSO Party (SEQP). The SEQP was the largest Amateur Radio experiment ever devised, and it generated the world’s most extensive set of HF propagation observations during an eclipse. Beyond the SEQP, HamSCI is attracting the interest of professional/academic researchers such as from numerous universities, the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico, MIT’s Haystack Observatory, and the HAARP facility in Alaska.

The WSJT Development Team: Initially the work of Joe Taylor, K1JT, the WSJT software suite is now maintained and extended by a team of developers led by Bill Somerville, G4WJS; Steve Franke, K9AN; Greg Beam, KI7MT; Michael Black, W9MDB; Edson Pereira, PY2SDR, and Nico Palermo, IV3NWV, in collaboration with Taylor. FT8, their latest digital mode, combines the extraordinarily low signal-to-noise ratio performance of JT9 and JT65 with a much faster decoding and exchange process.

Dale Hughes, VK1DSH: For his excellent work as chairman of the Amateur Working Group in ITU-R Working Party 5A and as Chairman of the sub-Working Group that addressed the allocation of a worldwide 60-meter Amateur Radio band during World Radiocommunication Conference 2015.

Receiving a Supporting Grant was Gary Pearce, KN4AQ, for his production and distribution of videos of interest to the Amateur Radio community through HamRadioNow and YouTube.

The Yasme Foundation is a not-for-profit corporation organized to support scientific and educational projects related to Amateur Radio, including DXing, and the introduction and promotion of Amateur Radio in developing countries.