HAMVENTION AWARDS

[IK0ZCW]

Dayton Hamvention has named his year's award winners (see https://hamvention.org/event-details/awards/ for the complete announcement). Yasuo "Zorro" Miyazawa (JH1AJT) is the recipient of the Amateur of the Year Award, which honours a radio amateur who "has made a long-term commitment to the advancement to amateur radio".
The Technical Achievement Award goes to Steve Franke (K9AN), Bill Somerville (G4WJS) and Joe Taylor (K1JT) for their development of the WSJT-X digital software suite, in particular the digital protocols FT8 and FT4. FT8 was introduced in July 2017, soon accounting for a large fraction of all amateur radio activity on the HF bands. FT4 is a closely related mode designed especially for digital contesting.
The Special Achievement Award is "usually given to a amateur who spearheaded a single significant project" and "made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of the radio art and/or science". The 2020 award winner is Jordan Sherer (KN4CRD) for developing JS8Call, an open source and free piece of software, inspired by WSJT-X and FLdigi, that provides weak signal keyboard-to-keyboard messaging to amateur operators.
Finally, the South Canadian Amateur Radio Society (SCARS), an ARRL Special Services Club based in the Oklahoma area, is the Club of the Year.