Yesterday marked the end of the school club roundup contest and it looks like we didn’t do too bad! Our final tally is 12,320 points. A full list of our contacts can be found on our website arc.umbc.edu/SCR.
We had a few interesting voice contacts on the 20m band yesterday. We talked to at least 2 other schools, one of which we had trouble hearing and almost didn’t make the contact. Most of our contacts were made through PSK, and we reached some people in a lot of different countries, some of which we had never heard of!
Over all, the SCR went very well this time around. The yahoo email reflector for the contest was buzzing with activity this past week. It was nice to see so many schools participating and hopefully next year we can contact more of them.
Until then, stay warm and have fun in the snow!
73,
Josh KB3QNA
Hi all!
It’s our third day of operating for the School Club Roundup and things are looking pretty good! We currently have over 6,000 points, almost triple what we had yesterday! The 20m band was buzzing with activity today and we were able to make a few more voice contacts. Hopefully tomorrow a few other club members will be able to make it out here, provided the roads are OK.
You can see a cumulative recap of our contacts and daily score on our website: arc.umbc.edu.
There’s only one more day left of the SCR and we’ll try to make the best of it!
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Josh KB3QNA
Hi Everyone,
It’s that time of year again — time for the School Club Roundup! Recently, the mid-atlantic region has been hit with several snow storms, but that didn’t stop Tom and I from making some contacts today during the SCR! We made most of our contacts via PSK, but we also snuck in a few voice contacts. We worked 20m today, but we will try 40m tomorrow for both PSK and voice.
You can check our website for a list of the states and schools that we have contacted as well as our current score. I’m not sure how we rank compared to other schools, but compared to our progress last year, we are ahead of schedule. There are also a few pictures of the shack and the 2 feet of snow that we had to trek through to get to the shack.
We were planning on having a club wide operating event on Thursday, but from the looks of the weather and the fact that our parking lot is not plowed, the event might be canceled. But keep checking your email and our website for updated info.
If you are from another school, please let us know via a comment if you will be on the air in the coming days. 73 and hope to see you all on the air!
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Josh KB3QNA
This weekend our club President, Tom, and I had the chance to participate in a special event at the National Electronics Museum in Linthicum, MD (K3NEM). The club was holding a special event to commemorate the anniversary of Pearl Harbor and was using the call sign W2W. Tom’s dad invited us to help him operate. The club was operating on 20 and 40m, but Tom and I worked 20m. We were pulling in contacts from all over the country, but mostly towards the west. We made contacts with California, North and South Dakota, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington state. I even made a DX long spot contact with someone in Australia!
I have to admit that I almost didn’t operate today because I felt kind of intimidated. I watched Tom’s dad work a few contacts on 20m and I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to try making any contacts. It all seemed to happen so quickly, and it was hard to hear what people were saying on the radio. But after I got on the air, I had a lot of fun talking to people – albeit all of my contacts involved short exchanges. All in all, it was a great way to get experience using HF and showed me that I need to work harder at earning my General class license.
This entire event was kind of last minute notice for our club – that’s why only Tom and I went. Hopefully next year we can schedule it so that more of our members can attend. It was definitely a great opportunity to get your feet wet without having the pressures of participating in an actual contest. We snapped a few pictures of Tom and I operating. I’ve posted one below and I’ll put the rest up on our website.
Tom and Josh at the W2W Event
Till next week,
73
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Josh KB3QNA
umbcarc
