By John McHale,
MTC conference chairman

BOSTON, 18 April 2007. I want to thank all of you who attended our Military Technologies Conference in Boston this year for supporting the event. I also want to thank you for your feedback on the content and the speakers.

We at Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine are pleased that those early reviews were very positive, especially regarding our talks on lead-free issues, International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITARs), and thermal management. All of our sessions generated lively discussion among the audience, but those three topics stood out.

The lead-free discussions and the ITAR presentation by Dean Young, Facility Security Officer at Celestica, occurred during the Opening Session. Lead-free was our keynote topic and the speakers were Anthony J. Rafanelli, Engineering Fellow, Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems and William Russell of Raytheon.

Thermal and Power Management Trends for Military Electronics was our anchor Module and ended the conference. It was led by our Advisory Council member and Boeing Senior Technical Fellow James Robles. Other key speakers from that module include: John Nairus, Chief, Electrochemistry and Thermal Sciences Branch, Air Force Research Laboratory / PRPS on Air Force Electrical Power and Thermal Management Challenges; Jim Smith, lead mechanical engineer for Sechan Electronics; Michael Gust, manager, mechanical systems analysis for the Defense Business Unit at Mercury Computer Systems and Rex Harvey, principal engineer, Advanced Cooling Systems Team, Parker Hannifin Corp.; and Trevor Landon, director of advanced technologies at TAG.

All of our Council did a wonderful job in helping prepare the content for this year's conference but I would especially like to single our Mr. Robles as well as Manuel Uhm of Xilinx and Joyce Tokar, president of Pyrrhus Software for their outstanding efforts in moderating and putting together our three modules.

Mr. Uhm moderated the Networking on the Move module, which was lead by Scott Dunderdale, director of on-the-move programs at General Dynamics C4 Systems on "Design Challenges for Networking on the Move Applications."

Ms. Tokar guided the Software Implementation for Open architectures Module, which included a talk by Robert Dewar, president and chief executive officer of AdaCore, on "Why High Integrity Software Requires Open Source Tools."

Next year our conference and exhibition will be in San Diego at the San Diego Convention center March 11 and 12. Many of our exhibitors were very excited about the move to California for 2008 and I hope you are as well.

Please continue to check out our conference website (www.miltechconference.com) as we move forward in the planning process for the 2008 conference as well as information about what happened at this year's conference.

Our staff will also continue to let you -- our readership -- posted on the latest content and speakers as they are confirmed.

We created this event as forum to discuss the issues most important to you so if you have any suggestions or concerns about our conference content please feel free to contact me at jmchale@pennwell.com and help us create the best conference content possible next year.

I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you in San Diego in 2008.

Thank you.

John