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Thursday, March 19, 2015

Vibroplex acquires Bencher, NAQCC News

Press Release - March 18, 2015

"Bencher, Inc. of Antioch Illinois announced the sale today of the Bencher Amateur Radio product lines to Vibroplex, LLC of Knoxville, Tennessee. This sale ends Bencher’s presence in the amateur radio field, thus allowing the principals, Jere Benedict, President, and Bob Locher, (W9KNI) to move towards retirement.

The product lines sold include the Bencher BY series of Iambic Paddles, (the world’s best selling iambic paddle, with over 150,000 sold) as well as the ST series of single lever paddles, the Bencher Hex Paddle, the N2DAN Mercury Paddle, and the Bencher RJ series Hand Keys. Also included in the sale are the HK-1 Universal Hook-up kit and the YA-1 Low Pass Filter.

Vibroplex has agreed to honor the manufacturer’s warranties of all covered products, and to offer parts and support for these products as well.

Vibroplex will continue to offer the Bencher products through existing marketing channels. Vibroplex may be contacted at http://www.vibroplex.com, or at (865) 309-5073.

Jere Benedict and Bob Locher wish to express their gratitude to the amateur radio community for its interest and support since the sale of the first Bencher amateur radio products in the early 1970’s."

NAQCC News

Tom Medlin, W5KUB, has been doing a webcast from the Dayton Hamvention for the past 13 years.  Recently he also started doing a weekly show called “Amateur Radio Roundtable.”  He will be interviewing Paul Huff N8XMS, via Skype about the NAQCC on next week's show. It will be aired this coming Tuesday, March 24th at 8:00 PM CDT (0100 on Wednesday UTC).  If you are interested you can watch the live webcast at http://w5kub.com/ .  The show will also be available in archived form for viewing at a later date.

In other news - the bands still seem to be in a recovery phase after the big solar storm.


The A and K indices are down and the 30 and 20 Meter bands are actually rated as "Good". In actuality, I wasn't hearing too much activity. 7QAA was present on both the 17 and 20 Meter bands, but was pretty weak. I did hear and work a strong ZF2UL on 15 meters. Hopefully, things will rebound even further for tomorrow, when I am home for the day.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!

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