The 56th Jamboree On The Air – 19 and 20 October 2013.

Jamboree On The Air (JOTA) and Jamboree On The Internet (JOTI) is an annual event in which Scouts and Guides from all over the world make contact with each other by means of amateur radio and internet. This is my seventh year of involvement. I ran a small station for Ballarat District scouts from Mt Beckworth. This was a JOTA only station running in conjunction with Cohan Shield activities. Also ran fox hunting as a Cohen activity with 2 ventures Paddy and James from Creswick as the foxes. This was well received by the scouts and I will expand for next year.

Yaesu FT897 running off batteries onto a full size G5RV.  Worked a treat.

Got 60+ scouts over Saturday and half of Sunday. Would receive up 6 to 12 at a time and had an hour. Getting scouts to talk on the radio is worse than pulling teeth. Least this year there were no computers to distract them. Once the fox hunt was off and running, I would call for a JOTA contact and then have each scout talk in turn. Only got a handful of contacts. It is important to ensure that all the scouts got a talk even if only ‘hello’. Once going there were a couple that showed interest and even came back after tea for 20m DX. 

40m was very busy with JOTA stations. Finding a free frequency was a challenge. Contacted a couple of  SOTA stations on Saturday but space and time was tight. During the course of the day talked to a couple of stations who normally would be out activating or chasing SOTA and picked up a couple of SA NP activations.