The 56th Jamboree on the Air happened this weekend. The propagation conditions seemed excellent with a number of European stations on the bands. I had a couple of Scouting friends seek me out via email, texting, and Facebook messaging to get me on the air and talk to their stations — Ohio and Alabama. Spoke to a number of Scouts and leaders Friday and Saturday.
I also was able to use D-Star to speak with Ray Novak, N9JA, from Icom America who was in Mozambique for the C82DX expedition. Had to wait for him to get done speaking to Scouts in the Netherlands and Argentina. He wanted to get on the air for JOTA. What a great supporter of Scouting and amateur radio.
Finally, I also did some scanning of the bands to gauge the overall activity. It looked like there was a great deal of JOTA activity, despite a contest or two underway. On Friday’s JOTA Jump Start I heard P41JOTA from Aruba talking to W5LEX on the aircraft carrier USS Lexington in Corpus Christi. On Saturday I heard a couple of K2BSA stations /0 and /5 but couldn’t make contact. I also heard a station on from Camp Eagle in Nebraska — my favorite camp from my own Scouting days.
We had 394 stations registered in the USA as of Friday morning. Over the next few weeks we’ll start getting the reports with photos, etc. Should be good fun to compile the report from what looks like an excellent weekend on the air!
