Jamboree on the Air and Support Your Parks Weekend
The third weekend of October is always a busy one for amateur radio. We had Jamboree on the Air (JOTA) 2025 as well as “Support your Parks Weekend” for Parks on the Air (POTA).
Jamboree on the Air
Jamboree-on-the-Air, or JOTA, is the largest Scouting event in the world. It is held annually the third full weekend in October. JOTA uses amateur radio to link Scouts and hams around the world, around the nation, and in your own community. This jamboree requires no travel, other than to a nearby amateur radio operator’s ham shack. Many times you can find the hams will come to you by setting up a station at your Scout camporee, at the park down the block, or perhaps at a ham shack already set up at your council’s camp. 1
Our troop, Troop 119 in Lexington, MA, had our October campout at Camp Resolute in Bolton, MA.
JOTA wasn’t the only activity - the Scouts were busy working on requirements such as knife and axe safety, working on Environmental Science Merit Badge by going on a nature hike and cooking their meals.
This is my third JOTA event with the troop and I will usually set up my station and during downtime in their schedule I’ll bring interested Scouts over to get on the radio.
As you can see, although most of my radio operations are using CW (Morse Code) I operate single side-band with the Scouts.
This Scout has his Technicians Amateur Radio License and has HF privileges for 10 meters. So he was able to operate my station using his own call sign.
Our Troop has policies for sharing photos of the Scouts so I covered the Scout’s faces
Here are the we contacts made during Troop 119’s JOTA event.
Support your Parks Weekend
Parks on the Air’s Support Your Parks weekends happen four times a year, one weekend each season. Since it was a beatiful Fall weekend and radio propogation was good I decided to head to US-8400, Beaver Brook State Reserve on Sunday after returning home from camping.
Here’s the certificate earned by activating that weekend.
Propogation was good - I operated on 20, 15 and 10 meters. My favorite POTA antenna’s height2 can be adjusted to be resonant on any band between 10 and 20 meters. A resonant antenna with a low takeoff angle seems to really help, especially on the higher bands.
This paragraph taken from Scouting America’s website at https://www.scouting.org/international/jota-joti/jota/ ↩
You can learn more about my 17 foot whip antenna here: Homebrew Quarter Wave Antenna ↩