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Hi Folks
Matthieu VE9MDB and myself VE9CEL gave a presentation to a few troops of scouts tonight. This was a French presentation and it was held at the Memramcook institute.
The presentation was part of the annual JOTA / JOTI where scouts from all over the world communicate with each other using either amateur radio or Internet technologies. It was very apparent tonight that the main focus of the event, was on communicating using the Internet. We were present at the beginning of the event and the leaders explained how they will be using the Internet to communicate (JOTI). The leader also spoke a little about amateur radio (JOTA), however he explained to the kids that amateur radio is not as popular as it used to be. This sort of set the stage for Matthieu and I, we took it as a challenge to make our presentation as exciting as we could.
I would like to thank Matthieu for his excellent job in presenting his part of the presentation. When Matthieu was speaking, you could see his passion for the hobby, if I was not already a ham, I would definitively have signed in right away. Matthieu also prepared 50 pamphlets on what amateur radio is and 50 pamphlets explaining how to get started with amateur radio. These last pamphlets included our contact information. Although the information for the pamphlets came from the RAC website, it took a considerable amount of work for Matthieu to print all of these, stick the label containing our contact information and folding all of the pamphlets. 25 of the participants took the pamphlets with them, this will help us greatly in our effort to recruit new members.
I would also like to thank Patrick Levasseur VE1PPL and Bert St-Onge, VE1PIN from the VE9CRM club (Le club de Radio Amateur du Madawaska) who helped us by speaking with the kids who wanted to try using a radio for the first time. Although we did not have an HF station setup and we could not communicate with other Scouts troops, we were able to demonstrate how amateur radio can be used to speak with other distant amateurs. This is an excellent demonstration of one amateur radio club helping out another amateur radio club, it is well appreciated and we will return the favour when the roles are reversed. Thanks for the support guys!
And finally but not least, I would like to thank the IRG for the use of the repeaters. Not only is this network of repeaters a great resource to have in times of emergencies, it is also an excellent resource to demonstrate the possibility of amateur radio, especially to a group of kids who don’t know what a world without the Internet would look like.
Matthieu suggested to the leaders that we could setup an HF station next year so that we could focus on the JOTA part of the event and they seems to be interested. I will send an email to the person who invited us to inform him of our interest. It would be useful if we can get other groups from New Brunswick to do the same, perhaps we should mention this to others on some of the nets.
I have attached a couple of pictures, the quality is not great, it was taken with my cell phone but you can see Matthieu presenting. (Click HERE to go to photos page)
73
VE9CEL - Charles Levasseur
Virtual Ham Shack: http://ve9cel.weebly.com
Greyhound Adoption: www.greyhoundadoption.ca
Monitors Moncton VHF 147.090 MHz, 147.345 MHz - UHF 442.250 MHz, 449.325 MHz
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