This year, I am pleased to announce that I will be activating the Boy Scouts of America’s Rancho Los Mochos during the annual, international Jamboree On The Air on October 15, 2011. With the help of KF6H and perhaps others, we will be putting Webelos and Boy Scouts on the air from 9am-5pm Pacific Daylight Time.
We are planning to have 3 transceivers and 2 operating stations. The HF station will try to work other scouts, scouters, and hams on or near the worldwide scouting frequencies on 10m, 15m, 20m, and 40m. The second operating station will monitor a VHF IRLP node and a UHF EchoLink repeater. Both operating stations will be giving scouts their first on-the-air experience, and we’ll be trying to reach other stations from around the globe.
For 2m, we’ll be using knife edge propagation off the top of Cedar Mountain to reach K6IV’s simplex IRLP node #7456 (146.565MHz). We will use this simplex node to connect to IRLP nodes with scouts.
On 440Mhz, we’ll be connecting to the Amateur Radio Repeater Group (ARRG) network of linked repeaters via the KI6FEO repeater (442.725+ (PL 77) ) covering much of the California’s central valley. One of the repeaters in the network can be accessed as EchoLink node 56555. We cannot initiate/terminate EchoLink connections because we’re not directly accessing the repeater that has the EchoLink connection. However, you’re welcome to connect to it. If you’re in California, try to reach us by the ARRG repeater network.
The HF station will focus on USB on 20m unless 15m or 10m is more productive. 40m is available, but we don’t expect to use it much if at all. If we’re not able to make phone contacts, we may switch to PSK31.
If you would like to set up a sked, please contact me. I will not have internet access at my operating location.
Best wishes to all JOTA operators out there!
This would be really neat.. except it doesn’t seem to work. 🙁
I emailed the poster, and he was experiencing a problem with the ADIF QSO mapper in the ADIF tools page. When he tried it, he ended up with a blank map. I suspect the problem is that the ADIF file doesn’t have LAT/LON or GRIDSQUARE fields for QSOs. I don’t have a database to convert call signs to locations.
The Jamboree on the Air station was a big success. We put 136 Webelos on the air. We didn’t make any exotic contacts, but we spoke to people in the Western US, and Canada by HF. We also contacted Canada, Australia, and New Zealand by IRLP.