San Antonio Hams

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.

May 7, 2008 – TSA Agents Become Ham Operators

A seven member VE Team lead by Pat AD5BR on behalf of San Antonio Radio Club, gave tests to 16 TSA agents and two other hams who wanted to try and upgrade. The test session was held during the week on a Wednesday morning, which created a challenge for Pat to find enough VE’s willing to take off work to handle this session.

TSA agents from all over the USA were flown in for a week’s worth of training, including studying for their ham radio license. 15 of the 16 passed their tech test, 1 tried twice but missed by 1 or 2 each time. One local ham upgraded to General while another tried for Extra without any luck.

After the test session was completed at the San Antonio International Aiport in the SA Airport Police’s training room, the participants got some hands-on work with stringing dipole antennas and other on-the-air practice.

Click here for more photos from this event.