10/20/2007 | K2BSA/5 What an exciting year for Jamboree on the Air! Venturing Crew 73, a Unit from Circle Ten Council in Dallas, Texas, operated from the National Boy Scout Radio Station, K2BSA for most of Saturday's event. All members of Venturing Crew 73 who attended the event served as control operators under the guidance of Crew Advisor's, which allowed scouts to communicate over ham radio, many of them for the first time.

Equipment used during the event consisted of a wide variety of new, and not so new, as well as name brand and homebrew. For example, our D-Star/IRLP station was connected to a dual band Copper Cactus J antenna, which was stuck in the ground due to the inability to find a suitable mounting point for it on short notice. It worked extremely well under the not so ideal conditions.

Many stations were contacted over HF SSB, and also using D-Star and IRLP on 2 meters and 70 centimeters. Generally speaking, the HF bands held up very well for contacts, and there was never a shortage of stations listening. All JOTA stations contacted were very pleasant and accommodating to work with, and the professionalism of control operators during busy pileups was second to none. They were truly a class act to make contacts with.

The groups who visited our station were very diversified in age and rank, from Tiger Cubs, all the way to Venture Scouts! In addition to groups scheduled to come operate at the station, there were a lot of walk-ins as well, due to a large Cub-Oree event taking place at our camp at the same time. You could tell the walk-ins were interested because they were late to the BB Gun range and still came in to talk on the radio! Even though there was a steady stream of visitors to the radio station during the day, we even found the time to test out a homebrew fox hunt beacon and direction finding antenna system for future activities.

Wow, we hope everyone else enjoyed JOTA as much as we did! In the meantime we will see you on the air, but, we can't wait until next year! -- KG4VPV