Fred Lloyd AA7BQ, President And Founder Of QRZ.com

We recently had the pleasure of a visit from Fred Lloyd, AA7BQ, the President and Founder of QRZ.com. Fred is doing a series articles titled “QRZ Featured Shacks” and he visited us to take photographs and gather background information on our station for a future Featured Shack article on QRZ.com.

Fred is very well-connected in the International Amateur Radio community and he shared a great deal of very interesting information about QRZ.com and Amateur Radio in general. The story around how QRZ.com came to be and the scope of its user community is a very interesting one! QRZ.com has approximately 500,000 registered users of which about 300,000 are active on the site a regular basis. The QRZ.com user community averages approximately 60,000 visits to the site a day. The QRZ.com website is currently hosted on Amazon Web Services S3 and serves approximately 600,000 pages a day or 18 million pages per month – quite a high-scale website! Fred has a number of interesting projects going to enhance the QRZ.com services including some pretty major enhancements to the QRZ.com logbook and related services.

George W9EVT’s Shack

One of the interesting stories that Fred shared with us was his experiences visiting George’s (W9EVT) station on Washington Island, WI. George has a collection of just about every Ham Radio ever made in his shack! You can read more about George’s station in Fred’s article titled “Washington Island’s HAM Radio Treasure” on QRZ.com.

Fred took many photographs and spent quite a bit of time learning about Anita’s (AB1QB) and my background, our Amateur Radio projects and experiences, and the design and construction of our station. He also took quite a few pictures as background for his upcoming article. Some of my favorites include a nice panoramic view of our shack:

Our Shack

and a great shot of our tower and antennas.

Our Tower And Antennas

He also took quite a few pictures of some of the details of our station including this one of me (AB1OC) standing at the base of our tower next to the hard-line coax cables used to feed our antennas.

AB1OC By The Tower

Anita and I really appreciate all of the time that Fred spent with us and the opportunity to have our shack be included in one of his upcoming articles on QRZ.com. I believe that the internet and websites like QRZ.com will continue to play an increasing important role in the evolution and growth of the Amateur Radio hobby.

– Fred (AB1OC)