October 14-16, 2016

The President Ford Council of the Boy
Scouts is holding Jamboree On the Air this year as part of a huge event at
Berlin Raceway called Outing for Scouting.

W8LRC is running one of the areas.

JOTA 2016

LARC members, HARC members, RRA members and several other ham radio operators helped the President Ford Council of Boy Scouts put on another successful Jamboree on the Air the weekend of October 14^th and 15^th at Berlin Raceway!

On Friday Jay McLellan, K8DC from the Riverside Radio Amateurs and Del, W8WDW set up some Hamstick dipoles and then strung a 6-160M G5RV up from a fence to the top of the grandstand. They got two radio working on several bands and starting making a few contacts. In the evening, a few scouts came over and Jay worked with one for quite a while. He was an 11-year-old scout that had just the week before passed his Technician test. His parents gave him a Baofeng HT for a birthday present that day so he brought that along. Jay helped him program in several of the repeaters near his home and they went out and tested the radio on the grounds. He was able to make a few contacts on HIS radio and was ecstatic!

Jeff Ver Hage, KB8QAP came in late in the afternoon and set up his rig and antenna also. During the evening he worked with several scouts to make some contacts. About 7:00 that evening we were informed that in a few minutes the GLOW party was going to start up in the other have our building. Having no idea what a GLOW party is, I asked and was told it was an event where they use UV light and glow sticks along with loud music to have fun. OK, loud music and ham radio especially in the dark doesn’t go well together. But, Jeff switched to using digital modes and when the lights went off, we switched to flashlight mode. Improvisation at it’s best!

Saturday, Nathan Hardman, N8THN, Mike Wolthuis, KB8ZGL and several members from HARC and other clubs showed up to help the scouts make contacts. The Outing for Scouting event included much more than ham radio and JOTA, but we had many scouts that wanted to work on the radios through the day. We had 9 ham operators that helped over 30 scouts make contact. Our final count of contacts was well over 100. We had maps on foam board where the scouts could put in a pin where they worked a contact.

I would very much like to thank all the operators that helped out. You introduced ham radio to many scouts this weekend!

Del Rockwell

W8WDW