…in beautiful Tampa, Florida!  I attended the IMS this year with big news – well, big news to the microwave engineering community.  Our site, Microwaves101.com, has entered into a partnership with the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.  What does this mean to the average viewer?  Well, for one thing, our broken message board will get fixed.  Questions submitted to the site should get answered faster.  We hope to add even more content to our microwaves encyclopedia, list of acronyms, hall of fame, and microwave mortuary sections.   We still have a few bugs to work out, but all in all I think this will be a good thing as we move forward.

In other news, Microwaves & RF magazine gave the Unknown Editor an award for Best Industry Blog.  He’s suitably grateful!

Other than that, the event was much like last year (see Heidi’s summary of IMS 2013), except that I didn’t have my lovely assistant with me so I had to work the booth by myself for all three days.  This is much more exhausting than it sounds!  There were over 7,500 microwave engineers, over 900 other exhibitors, and 3 very intense days of shop-talk.

Luckily, I did have a bit of time to have some fun!  Our hotel was actually in Ybor City – a quick shuttle-ride from the convention center.  Ybor is a former Cuban cigar factory neighborhood, that currently has ALL kinds of clubs and cigar shops.  We only stopped once to get cigars.

Another night, we went to the Bowling party hosted by Microwaves & RF and AWR/NI.  Another really fun evening!   Food, drink, bowling, and pool.  It was there I ran into a lovely young man named Tal.  He remembered me from last year – ok, he probably remembered HEIDI from last year – but he was very sweet and clearly having a lot of fun.  I hope we run into him again next year in Phoenix!