GARS TechFest booth and monthly meeting
DeKalb ARES staffed an information booth at the Gwinnett Amateur Radio Society's annual TechFest in Lawrenceville and held its monthly meeting at DeKalb Fire Rescue Headquarters the same day.
About TechFest
GARS TechFest is the annual outreach and education event run by the Gwinnett Amateur Radio Society at the Gwinnett County Fairgrounds Expo Center in Lawrenceville. It’s free to attend and is one of the larger metro-Atlanta amateur radio gatherings of the year — a mix of presentations, hands-on demos, kit-building, exam sessions, and information tables from amateur radio clubs and EmComm groups across the state.
The 2026 event was originally scheduled earlier in the month but was postponed to February 21 due to a winter-weather forecast threatening road conditions on the original date — a sensible call that put the event squarely on the same Saturday as our regular monthly meeting.
Who else was there
Other organizations with displays alongside DeKalb ARES included:
- Georgia AUXCOMM
- Gwinnett County ARES
- North Fulton Amateur Radio League (NFARL) — with a 6–7 table corner space
- Gwinnett Amateur Radio Society itself, hosting the event
What was on the schedule
A representative slice of the day’s activities:
- Code Practice Oscillator kit-building station for hands-on Morse practice
- Antenna modeling presentation
- Radio voice contest
- Chili competition
- Afternoon fox hunt (radio direction-finding exercise)
- Free Baofeng radios for youth passing their amateur radio licensing exam on site
- Demos across the typical TechFest spread — FLDigi, Packet, D-STAR, DX, QRP, Satellite, plus the “Strange Antenna Challenge”
- The GARS raffle prize drawing at 3:15 PM at the GARS table
What DeKalb ARES brought
DKARES staffed an information booth covering what we do, who we serve, how to get involved, and where the weekly net is. The booth is one of the few formal venues each year for explaining ARES to licensed amateurs who haven’t yet plugged into an EmComm group, and to event-curious visitors who walked the floor without a callsign.
Same day — monthly meeting
The DKARES monthly meeting ran later the same day at DeKalb Fire Rescue Headquarters (the standing third-Saturday venue). The back-to-back schedule meant members who staffed the TechFest booth in the morning could roll directly into the monthly meeting in the afternoon — a tight but doable day.