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
Hey everyone! We’re back from Winter break and ready to get back into the swing of things! Tom and I have been busy lately, but we’re working on some exciting things for the club for the Spring Semester. Here’s a preview of some upcoming events. If you want to help us plan events, send an email to Tom or Josh. Coming up this semester:
Feb. 1 – First Meeting of the Semester
Feb. 3 – Involvment Fest on Maintstreet in the Commons from 11-2pm. We need people to help man our table and talk to interested students.
Feb. 8-12 – ARRL School Club Roundup. We will be doing something similar to last semester with pizza, etc.
March – possible inter-club event. Details still pending.
If you have any suggestions for activities, leave a comment below. The UMBC ARC is always looking for ways to get involved with other groups and organizations, so drop us a line if you have ideas!
73,
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
Sorry that it has been a while, but the results for the School Club Roundup are up on our website. Click here to see the results. We sent our official results in last week to be tallied, so I guess we’ll find out later how the club did compared with other schools. I know www.collegearc.com has some good articles about the SCR and I believe some schools have posted info about how the contest went for them. If you are from a school club that participated in the contest, feel free to comment on this post about how the contest played out for your club.
73,
Josh KB3QNA
Last evening marked our first weekly meeting after the School Club Roundup contest. We did pretty well in the contest, considering that it was our first time. Everyone got a chance to get on the air. We made all of our contacts using PSK-31 since our other Kenwood HF radio wasn’t cooperating with us. Our President is compiling a list of our contacts and it should be posted on our website shortly. You can visit here to see our results from last week.
In other news, we were able to get the Kenwood HF radio working last night! Thanks to Carlos’ magic touch, the Kenwood is now in working order. Carlos made a contact in Nevada last night on PSK-31 and we heard plenty of people on voice. Now that we’ve got two working HF radios, it’s time for us to enter another contest. Coming up at the end of the month is the ARRL November Sweepstakes contest. If there is enough interest in the club, we will be participating. Once details are finalized, we’ll post info on our homepage.
That’s all for now. Check back next week for another update!
umbcarc
