Ham-Com provides tickets with stubs that attendees must place in a barrel. At specified times, the prize booth staff (volunteers who usually members of an area club) draw a ticket stub and display the number of the ticket that was drawn in the main exhibit hall. For hourly drawings, these numbers are displayed all day. However, prizes that are not picked up at the end of the first day of the event are rolled over to the next day. Any prizes that are not claimed by the end of the second day are placed in the "shotgun" drawing (see below).

The need to be present to win is two-fold. First, Ham-Com is not (for a variety of reasons), a qualified organization under the Texas Charitable Raffles law, Chapter 2002. It is the opinion of the Ham-Com, Inc. Board of Directors that this requires the award of "door prizes" rather than "raffle prizes." Therefore, you must purchase a ticket and be present to win a "door prize." Ham-Com has no interest is becoming involved in an expensive injunctive action with the courts over the award of prizes at our event. If you're at all interested in reading the law, you can find it in the Texas Annotated Statutes. There are online sources or you could probably find a copy in your public library.

Second, Ham-Com is a very expensive event to produce. The commercial vendors that attend our event provide a large percentage of the capital required to produce it. The "door prize" giveaways and the timing of same ensure that enough people attend the event to make their investment worthwhile. To put it another way, the exhibitors and vendors are paying a great deal of money toward your enjoyment of the event. While ticket sales do help, Ham-Com would not be able to produce the event in its present form based on the sale of admission tickets alone. Special note: Members of the Ham-Com Board of Directors and the operations staff are ineligible to win "door prizes" from the event.

The prize booth staff runs a "shotgun" drawing at the end of the last day. Everyone present at the drawing provides their entry badge and the staff draws names for each prize until everything has been awarded. For the past several years, Ham-Com has published the photos of "door prize" winners on the Web site via the "Photos" link.

Information about Ham-Com "door prizes" is clearly posted on the Web site via the "Terms" link. Each time prizes are mentioned in the "Ham-Com Flyer" the terms "You must be present to win..." are shown.

Because we have found PayPal to be a safe, secure, and financially agreeable payment management system.

Customer information entered on the order form is secured by PGP encryption and credit card information is transmitted securely over the Internet via SSL. No credit card (number, expiration, CVV2 code) information is stored on our website.

The move to Plano was made for several reasons:

• The Arlington Convention Center would not provide us with a date in June 2006. That forced the Ham-Com, Inc. Board of Directors to consider moving the event to either May or July. The Board decided that a May date would be too close to the Dayton Hamvention and that July was not good because of higher summer temperatures and pre-planned vacations.
• The costs at the Arlington location would have forced an increase in admission, commercial exhibitor and flea market tables. The parking fee was not negotiable plus hotel and food costs would have increased due to the Dallas Cowboy's impending move to a new stadium site in Arlington. The increase was in the form of a new hotel tax (9%) that would help retire the city's debt on the purchase of land, the stadium and the parking lots.
• There are other reasons including the fact that the service provided by the hotel adjacent to the Arlington Convention Center has deteriorated and the potential conflicts with Texas Ranger baseball games. For those reasons (and many more that we won't take the time to discuss here), the Ham-Com, Inc. Board of Directors searched the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex for a suitable location. There are only five or six potential locations that could handle an event our size. We toured Fair Park, the American Airlines conference center, the Naman Forrest Center, Market Hall, Will Rogers Coliseum, Mesquite Exposition Center and the Fort Worth Convention Center. The locations in Dallas and Fort Worth and the State Fair Grounds didn't appear to be suitable for a number of reasons. The Mesquite Exposition Center was booked. The Naman Forrest Center in Garland would not provide a date in June 2006 due to high-school graduation schedules, Frisco was far too expensive and Plano, while being smaller, seemed to provide the best option.

• A venue with a reasonable amount of space that includes classrooms.
• Lower price for rental of the entire facility. That allows us to lower costs for admission, commercial exhibitors and flea market vendors.
• A consistent date for the next five years. Ham-Com will be the second weekend of June through 2011. That eliminates conflicts for commercial exhibitors with the Dayton Hamvention and Sea-Pac in Seattle. Both events caused problems in the past and forced cancellations for commercial vendors who simply don't have the bandwidth to support two nearly simultaneous events.
• FREE parking. That is probably the most often heard complaint from attendees.
• Lower costs for hotels--40-50% less than Arlington.
• Lower food costs.

The Ham-Com, Inc. Board of Directors believes that we can produce a high-quality event at the Plano Centre. Our goal is to attract prospective and new Hams so that the event will continue to grow. We appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you at Ham-Com!

Yes...two area clubs will sponsor an outdoor flea market on the west side of the Plano Convention Center