02/09/2018

Acting on a recommendation of the QST editorial staff, the ARRL Foundation Board of Directors has selected Paul Danzer, N1II, of Norwalk, Connecticut, as the winner of the 2017 Bill Orr, W6SAI, Technical Writing Award[1] for his article, "The ABCs of a Digital Multimeter," which appeared in the October 2017 edition of QST (p 37). The Foundation Board announced the award recipient on February 7.

"I am surprised and delighted to receive this award," Danzer reacted. "I became a ham at the age of 13, and that led to a career as an electronic engineer and later as a college professor. The ham community has been a constant companion through these years, and it is a pleasure writing for my fellow hams in QST."

This is the second time around, for Danzer, a former ARRL Headquarters staffer (1994-1998), book editor, and author, who also won the Bill Orr Award for 2004. The award recognizes the recipient's ability to explain technical topics in a manner that is easy for relatively non-technical people to understand.

Danzer is the author of Your Ham Antenna Companion and other ham radio titles and magazine articles, and he wrote one of the first children's books on computers in 1981, A Young Person's Guide to Computers. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and is a Life Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Danzer holds several patents, and he served as a professor of computer science at Housatonic Community College in Connecticut (1998-2016).

Bill Orr, W6SAI - the award's namesake - is best known for his voluminous publications for radio amateurs, including such reference gems as The Radio Handbook, The Beam Antenna Handbook, The Quad Antenna Handbook, The VHF-UHF Manual, and The W6SAI HF Antenna Handbook, some written in collaboration with Stu Cowan, W2LX. From the 1940s through the 1980s, Orr was a frequent contributor to QST, and he constructed some of the amplifiers once used at ARRL Maxim Memorial Station W1AW. He died in 2001.

 


[1] http://www.arrl.org/arrl-foundation-special-funds

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