San Antonio Hams

This year’s JOTA event in San Antonio will be held at McGimsey Scout Park in Castle Hills, near Northwest Military @ Lockhill Selma.  Members from the San Antonio Radio Club, Alamo Area Radio Organization and others will be setup for a one day event, Saturday October 20th, from around 8am til 5pm ??, helping Scouts get on the Ham Radio and showing them our hobby.

The Jamboree-on-the-Air, or JOTA, is an annual Scouting event that uses amateur radio to link Scouts around the world, around the nation, and in your own community.

Held on the third full weekend of October each year, this worldwide jamboree requires no travel, other than to a nearby radio amateur’s ham shack. Many times the hams will come to you by setting up at a Scout camporee, or perhaps they already have a ham shack at your council’s camp.

Tell Me More

Scouts of any age can participate, from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts and Venturers. Once at the ham radio station, the communication typically requires speaking into a microphone and listening on the station speakers. However, many forms of specialized communication can also take place, such as video communication, digital communication using typed words on the computer screen transmitted by radio, communication through a satellite relay or an earth-based relay (called a repeater), and many others. The exchanges include such information as name, location (called QTH in ham speak), Scout rank, age, and hobbies. The stations you’ll be communicating with can be other Scouts across town, across the country, or even around the world! The World Scout Bureau reported that the 2011 JOTA had nesrly 750,000 Scout participants from over 6,000 amateur radio stations! A participant patch is available, as is a certificate/log sheet that can also be used to fulfill a Radio merit badge requirement.

When Is It?

The 55th Jamboree-on-the-Air is October 20–21, 2012, but in San Antonio, our event will be Saturday only. The official hours are from Saturday at 00:00 hours local time (right at midnight Friday) to Sunday 24:00 (midnight Sunday evening). So you’ve got the whole weekend to make JOTA contacts.  Even if you aren’t able to help out in person, locally, get on the air and be there when other Scouts around the world are looking for folks to talk with, especially if you are a female ham radio operator!  They love to talk with the girls!  Hmm, wonder why that might be?  LOL

Members of the San Antonio Radio Club W5SC and Alamo Area Radio Organization AA5RO put on their annual JOTA event out in Castle Hills, at the McGimsey Scout Park, located off NW Military near Lockhill Selma Road.   This is an annual event held the 3rd Saturday of each October.  

Another local JOTA event was held up at Canyon Lake, but we don’t (yet) have any photos or details to share.

Andrew KD5NNN attended the event, and was kind enough to share these photos with us…

Read the rest of this entry »

October 17th was the date of the 15th anniversary celebration at the Great Northwest Branch Library, one of many branches that is part of the San Antonio Public Library system.  This library is located off of Grissom Road, near Culebra & Tezel Rd.  

Because this branch is the site of VE Test Sessions every other month by Pat AD5BR, representing the SARC VE Team, the head librarian asked Lee N5NTG to put on a demonstration Ham Radio Station as part of their celebration.  SARC was already committed to being at JOTA over at McGimsey Scout Park in Castle Hills, so Hill Country REACT agreed to sponsor the station at this event.

Below are two videos that I made up from the raw footage and photos taken during the event. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Information about the Bexar Operators Group, including what they have done and their planned events, can now be found at their new site: Bexar Operators Group – Home  

This club is an active amateur radio group and not a social club. Up coming events include participation in this year’s JOTA event which will focus on operating “green” with solar panels and wind turbines.

We also sponsor the annual “Jump Team Boot Camp”. All types of antenna testing and field operations are done in order to make members better operators in both contests and during emergency conditions.

This webpage also includes two links which will get you to W2IK’s old AOL webpages (45 of them) that were thought lost. Between the two you should find them all!

For further info, contact us through our new web page or at: W2IK@arrl.net

Under the direction of Mike, AB5EB, another JOTA (Jamboree On The Air) operation is scheduled to take place this October at the Overlook Point near the Canyon Lake dam in Texas to show scouts what amateur radio is all about. Planning will show the diversity of amateur radio as scouts talk to other scouts from all over the world. 

The amateur radio operators, featuring Mike, AB5EB, Carlos, KE5DFK, Bob, W2IK, and others are ready to set up and operate several stations  using several modes, such as voice, morse code (CW), digital and slow-scan television. Additional hams who would like to be a part in helping out scouts should contact Mike at: ab5ebdxer@gmail.com 

Other events will be  offered such as two of W2IK’s “McGyver” antenna building sessions where scouts build actual antennas from scrap materials and use them to make contacts. A merit badge class given by Mike, AB5EB might also be planned. Still in it’s planning stages, Mike wants this JOTA to be even better than the event held last year at this location where over 70 scouts attended. Stay tuned as the planning cements into another great JOTA event!

ARRL WEST COAST CONVENTION – “With A Little Texas Touch”

In mid July, Bob Hejl, W2IK, was approached via email by Per Brashers, KI6JJS, requesting permission to reprint several of his Emcomm and antenna building web sites to assist in presenting a RACES forum at “PACIFICON 2008″, which is also known as the “Dayton Of The West”. It is the major ARRL West Coast convention held in mid October and offers dozens of lectures, a swap meet, exhibits, demonstrations and even an operational JOTA station. To learn more, see:

http://www.pacificon.org/index.html

Emails were exchanged and the request soon escalated into more than simple reprint permission. KI6JJS also requested assistance with creating his actual presentation script.

Read the rest of this entry »

Under the direction of Mike, AB5EB, a rather large contingent of boy scouts and cub scouts converged at Overlook Point near the Canyon Lake dam in Texas to see what amateur radio was all about. They got more than they envisioned as the diversity of amateur radio was revealed. The amateur radio operators, featuring Mike, AB5EB, Rich, N5RAG, Carlos, KE5DFK and Bob, W2IK, were ready and waiting with several stations that operated using several modes, such as voice, digital and slow-scan television.

Other events were offered such as two antenna building sessions where scouts built actual antennas from scrap materials and used them to make contacts.The most rewarding event was the merit badge class given by Mike, AB5EB. During the class, they learned quite a bit about radio communications, “Q” signals, etc and were each also required to make an actual ham radio contact.

Also covered were basics in fox-hunting using a homemade “tape measure” antenna, PSK digital operating basics, viewing slow-scan television pictures being sent by other hams, MARS, Military Affiliated Radio Systems were explained and as added bonuses, several scouts assembled short wave radio kits using point to point wiring and in the afternoon a “geo-caching” hunt was held where scouts used GPS units, under the direction of a scout dad, to discover hidden “treasures”.

Also available were food and refreshments sold under the direction of scout moms and dads as a fundraiser. Next year’s event promises to be bigger and better!

Below are more photos from the event.  For more information about the sponsoring group, please visit them on the web at www.KX5BSA.org

Bob  W2IK

Read the rest of this entry »

The first “MacGyver” antenna building session held during the 2008 JOTA operation at Canyon Lake, Texas was so successful that in the afternoon several scout moms cornered me and almost begged that I run it again so the afternoon group could join in on the fun.What was the “MacGyver” antenna project?

The scouts began at a long table where I dumped the contents of a large popcorn tin, which was filled with wire, plastic pieces, odd metal parts, tools, two 12 foot measuring tapes, a spark plug wire and other useful and useless items along with a scrap of paper which had a hand-drawn diagram of a dipole antenna with just a series of total length per bands scrawled on the top.

It was up to the scouts to find the proper pieces and share in the building of a simple dipole under the supervision and extensive verbal support, cheering and crying of the “MacGyver Special Assistance Team”.
The scouts measured and cut wire, stripped ends, put on PVC end insulators, a center connector was added, and put rope on each end. Imagine their surprise when we ran the dipole up the “flag-pole” masting and promptly made a contact to a ham in Oklahoma!

Read the rest of this entry »

Over 70+ Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts attended the JOTA event held this past weekend out at the Canyon Lake Dam.  Members of GVARC and other hams came out to support this event which turned into a mini-field day event.Scouts got to try three modes of communications, Voice, PSK31 and CW.  Only 20 meters was really working well, the other bands seemed unresponsive, at least thru the morning hours.

W2IK was there with his boxes of antenna goodies, and he challenged one group of scouts to build something “MacGyver Style”.   He got lots of blank looks from kids who had never heard of MacGyver, until one scout popped up and asked “wasn’t that the guy who plays the part of the guy in charge of the teams on Stargate SG1?”Despite the generation gap, Bob was able to explain that in this large Popcorn canister, were parts. Lots and lots of parts, with some junk tossed in for good measure. 

The challenge was to build a working dipole antenna out of these parts.And the challenge was met after a couple of hours, and the first contact was from Oklahoma.

I’m expecting a full report from W2IK with photos since he was there the entire time, and I was only there about an hour around lunch time, since I had been working the Triathlon instead that morning.  I’ll correct any errors / discrepancies in this report at that time.