With only a few days left till Winter YOTA, we want to thank our sponsors to make this event possible! Young amateur radio enthusiasts coming from Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Romania, Serbia and The Netherlands will be travelling to Oosterhout, in the Southern part of The Netherlands. Listen for PA6YOTA 12-15 December and make a QSO with one of the youngsters. Follow the YOTA pages for updates on the event!
The first camp for young amateur radio operators in North, Central, and South America is coming to West Chester, Ohio in June, 2020.
A summer camp for licensed amateur radio operators ages 15 through 25 will take place June 21 through June 26, 2020 at the National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting in West Chester Township (North Cincinnati), Ohio, according to an announcement today by the Youth on the Air (YOTA) committee in IARU Region 2. The camp is being hosted by the museum and the West Chester Amateur Radio Association (WC8VOA). The camp, a modified version of the popular Youngsters on the Air camps in IARU Region 1 covering Europe and Africa, is operated by Electronic Applications Radio Service, Inc. (EARS). EARS is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization dedicated to wireless technologies and activities. IARU Region 2 covers North, Central and South America. The camp will focus on building peer & mentor relationships and learning how to take amateur radio to the next level. Campers will attend workshops and activities in multiple STEM-related subjects, such as Radio Contesting, Electronic Kit Building, D-STAR, APRS, Satellite Communications, Building Antennas, and Radio Direction Finding and Orienteering. Campers will also build teams and contesting skills by using amateur radio at nearby Kings Island Amusement Park. A high altitude balloon launch is also being planned. Social and team building activities include a pizza and pool party, a trip to Dave & Buster’s and operation of a special event station using the call sign W8Y. The event is a pilot for what hopefully will become a future series at other locations. This is the first camp specifically for youngsters 15 to 25 living in the Americas who already have their amateur licenses.
This camp could not take place without financial and equipment support. Campers will use the latest and greatest amateur radio equipment courtesy of ICOM America, Heil Sound, X-Tronic, and R&L Electronics. Major financial supporters at the time of this press release include: the Yasme Foundation, the World Wide Radio Operators Foundation, Orlando Hamcation and Orlando Amateur Radio Club (OARC), the Northern California DX Foundation (NCDXF), Dayton Hamvention and Dayton Amateur Radio Association (DARA), the Huntsville Hamfest, the ARRL Foundation, Southwest Ohio DX Association (SWODXA), Radio Amateurs of Canada, and Gary West, K8DEV & Dee Dee West, KA8DXE. Their financial support makes it possible for these aspiring young amateur radio operators to attend the camp at a greatly reduced cost. Clubs and individuals who wish to donate to help further defray the costs of the camp can do so via PayPal by visiting YOTAregion2.org, and clicking on the donate button. Donations can also be made on GoFundMe. More information about YOTA in the Americas as well as the summer camp can be found at YOTAregion2.org, and on YOTAregion2 on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. YOTAregion2.org is also sponsored by ICOM America.
For the past two months, few things happen in France. Back from Sofia, I wrote first a CR for the REF society and the administrators who were convinced about the fact that what they did for me this year has to continue the next few years with me but not only, with the objective to see a YOTA France born. Then I have the ascent of the REF to write an article for RadioRef Mag, who is the only and the most read by the French amateur community radio magazine. At mid-October I met F5DJL President of REF and F1AGR who is the “coordinator” of the youth activities. I made two proposal who were quickly accepted. First, creating a website/page in French with goals to explain what YOTA is to the 15-26 population of F licenced, and to let know to the French amateur community that there are some youngsters involved in this hobby in their own country. The other goal of this page is to allow everyone who is interested by YOTA to get directly a contact with someone who knows what he is talking about (not someone who’ll ask someone else and then no answer). The last goal comes with the second initiative I took, create a Telegram YOTA France, a unique group, not one on WhatsApp, not one on snapchat, a unique Telegram group where all Youngsters from France can start to speak and organise events together (so inform that there is a formal group of discussion for those who don’t think that it could be exist or don’t find the person who can enter it in the group). If they are interested by the international part of the YOTA Group, of course they’ll be added on the Gen Group.
So, after LZ YOTA :
-CR to the REF
-Article
-Meeting with the REF
-Building the website (simple but functional)
-Creating the unique known place of chat to bring together the France youngsters
After that, using every social media and our Website to encourage everyone interested to be added to the group. It’s just starting. By the way for the next activities, we will be active as TM19YOTA, I’ll represent Youngsters in the French contest commission at the end of November, and I have been contacted by F4GKR to be with him in Serbia next year for the IARU meeting. For the Website and the Group, I hope that before December it will be operational. I think that this is doable.
Just for information : REF has a list of potential 26 youngsters in France (in age of being selected). We have no information about those who are in age but not in the REF list.
Best regards, CU perhaps in the WE during the WW, Tom F4HWS.
In the last 2 months important achievements were made for youth in Austria. The support from our society OEVSV has greatly increased. After we put lots of effort into convincing them of the importance of youth.
At the general assembly of the society, youngsters were present to put pressure on the representatives of each region of Austria. They all agreed to organise youth activities with their regional youth coordinators and support the youngsters already in their regions with any activities they want to organise. Additionally, the youth coordinator on the national level secured a budget specifically for youth activities. It shows that slowly the OMs are realising that youth is the way forward.
Some other important achievements were also made:
There will be an OEVSV online learning platform so that youngsters can learn for their license exams online when and where they want to. Before we often had the problem that youngsters were interested but it was too difficult for them to learn for the exam because there were no courses near them etc. and with time, they lost interest. This online learning platform will solve this problem. On the platform there will be video lessons, but the users will also be able to ask questions and get feedback on their progress.
The youth team in Austria will create a website, which is independent from the website of the OEVSV website. There was a youth section on the society website before but that was difficult to find and there was not a lot of content on there. We want to make the website “by youngsters, for youngsters” so all the content on the site is made and written by youngsters. We have lots of great ideas for things we could do with the website. We will also make social media channels, to start off we will make an Instagram account and do our best to upload content on a weekly basis. A goal like uploading content every week is also a good motivator to go out and do something. All of our platforms will be named YOTA-Austria.
Our plan is to create a stronger youth community in Austria, at the moment very few youngsters actually know each other. Getting the support from the heads of the individual regions was key to connecting youngsters across Austria more. First of all, we will do some activities to bring the existing youngsters closer together. Once we have a group of motivated and active youngsters, we can start focusing on getting new youngsters interested in the hobby. For instance, going to schools and universities etc.
The highlight of the coming year will no doubt be a sub-regional camp in Austria. After organising the YOTA summer camp in 2016, enthusiasm about the camp was very high within the society. Now with the sub-regional camp we have the opportunity to organise a camp again. We hope to make it a large sub-regional camp with lots of cool activities and workshops.
During the YOTA Bulgaria 2019 the Swedish team consisted out of two participants. The camp was considered great fun, but a general thought was that the time planning seemed a little off. For some things, that could have needed more time, time was missing and for some things, we were done way before the schedule. To the “thumbs up”-parts, the team liked that there was a lot of activities presented and nice to see that our hobby has so many side tracks.
The Swedish Youth team, SK0YT, consists of 6 members in the central committee. There is supposed to be one from each district SM0-SM7 but at the moment, representation from SM1 and SM4 is missing. There are more youngsters in Sweden, but they are not included in the planning committee.
Since YOTA, no youth activities have been done in Sweden. But the Swedish youth team is planning to have a camp for December YOTA Month. The camp will be held in Jönköping and we expect about 5-10 youngsters.
The weekend thereafter, we are planning a Nordic youth meeting. This will be a meeting where all Nordic youth societies can discuss how we will do the NOTA which is one of the things we are planning on for long term. Even though the camp was planned to be held in Norway, the Swedish committee helps the Norwegian one in terms of planning, the camp is also likely to be held in Sweden which makes us responsible for the planning. But at the moment, that is only briefly planned.
Team Finland at YOTA 2019
Finland has been represented at YOTA summer camps since 2012. This time the team consisted of four people: Anu OH6ME as a team leader accompanied by Otava OH3OT, Tia OH3TIA, and Mikael OH3UAF. Only Anu had been at YOTA summer camp before, so it made a nice first camp for the others. And what a camp it was!
Before the camp, we had high expectations for it, as the other youngsters in Finland had only told good things about the past camps. We knew the week would be about meeting new people, having a great time among our hobby while learning a lot of new things! Now, after the camp, I think we all can say that we were most sincerely right!
Learning at the camp was fun! The technical side was made easy from the start, nothing too difficult. Even us who had never been that much in contact with antenna building enjoyed the workshops. Also, some of the lectures (for example the antenna guying) were really good. Because as we have a youth team for organizing youth activities in Finland, we really are going to take advantage of the Train The Trainer lectures!
Visits to Sofia city center, Milara factory and LZ5R contest station we’re a huge plus to the program! It’s always nice to see something from the country you are at, and it surely should be part of future YOTA camps as well.
How does the youth team work in Finland?
In Finland, the youth team has been there since the start of the 21st century. In 2015 Juuso OH1BAR took the led of the youth team. Since then the youth team has been growing in terms of activity. In 2017 Kati OH2FKX became the team leader. In October of 2019 youth team consists of six members: Kati OH2FKX (Team leader), Niko OH5CZ (assisting team leader), Vilma OH2VT, Otava OH3OT, Anu OH6ME, and Antti OH6VA. At the end of the year Antti will leave the team with Mikael OH3UAF replacing him.
The youth team works in co-operation with the other committees of SRAL. Vilma and Otava are part of marketing committee, with Otava also attending SRAL 100 years committee from the start of 2020.
The youth team is the main youth activity organizer in Finland. We have meetings every month in Google meet. Between the meetings someone has always something to do. Most of our activities happen yearly, which makes it easier to plan as we already have experience doing similar things. For more information about what we do, check ‘What’s on the horizon’ down below!
What’s on the horizon?
Next year of youth activity in Finland will consist of the same base as last year. By next August we will organize two camps. First of them, Polar has already been held from 11th to 13th of October. At Polar, Niko OH5CZ held a contest training. With the lead of Niko, the participants operated SAC SSB with OH2YOTA-callsign in multi/multi with 180k+ score and 783 QSOs. At DYM-camp we will be having as many QSOs as we can with OH2YOTA callsign from OH5Z contest station. (Last year we made little more than 5000 QSOs in three days!)
In Finland other than camps we will continue maintaining youth section on the SRAL webpage (www.sral.info/nuoriso) and @yotafinland Instagram page and youtube-channel.. We will be making whole new youth-targeted marketing materials in co-operation with the marketing team of SRAL. We will also be writing articles to Finnish ham magazine “Radioamatööri”. During December Yota Month, we will give youngsters and clubs in Finland an opportunity to use OH2YOTA callsign. We will market that as much as possible. That way we could maximize our DYM QSO-amount.
What comes to Nordic youth co-operation, we will deepen it by attending the Nordic youth team meeting near to Stockholm, Sweden in December of 2019. We will increase activity on our joint Instagram and make a graphical guide for @nordicsontheair social-medias. We’ll also help with organizing the NOTA 2020 in Norway next spring, which will be a tough job as there are not many youngsters in Norway. As we want to grow the NOTA brand, we won’t be having our own Sub-Regional camp in Finland.
Next summer there is a change that we do co-operation with OHDXF and Finnish lighthouse society to give youngsters an unique change for a DX-pedition at Market Reef OJØ, and of course, send a team to YOTA 2020! We will also arrange some programme for the youth in the SRAL’s summer camp. The program will include a youth meeting and youth operating hours from the camp station. Also, for the first time ever, we will be teaching ham radio for interested not-yet-ham youngsters at the summer camp!
As you can see, another busy year in Finland is about to start. We will be actively reporting about our activity on later TTT reports, next time in December, then you will hear how our DYM-camp went!
TTT Report DL – October 19
This years YOTA Camp brought some (smaller) changes into the TTT work in DL. Main point is that the team has grown and now consist of this year’s DL Team, some Youngsters from previous YOTA Camps and the youth coordinators of the DARC. Since we’re all scattered throughout DL we organize ourselves using a group chat or Skype calls. Until now we mainly spoke about new ideas and techniques we got through the camp and how we can continue and improve our work so far. More concretely, this consists of a general feedback from this year’s team on the youth work done so far, as a previously uninvolved person notices other aspects. We also compared and analyzed the differences between a bigger summer camp and a subregional camp to get each camp advantages. Hereby, we were able to benefit from the ideas of other countries which were gained by our team throughout the summer camp. This includes using other tools to organize the general work and plan upcoming events.
Besides that we realized that compared to other countries, our social media performance could be better since most of the youth nowadays uses it in everyday life. Constant uploads can help to stay interested in our hobby and additionally they can show youngsters new projects what they might want to check out as well. Nevertheless, to achieve this it is necessary to constantly keep up a performance on a regular basis. We therefore still have to find a way how we can do so and which kind of social media channels we want to use. Further we also need to make sure how to reconcile this with the GDPR, especially if it comes to pictures.
For the upcoming year, we still need to determine, if, how and in which way we are going to organize a youth camp again. The feedback we got from a youth camp like e.g. the Subregional camp or the ham camp during Friedrichshafen was consistently positive, however we could not observe much interest in other activities like the YOTA summer camp or the YouthContestingProgram YCP.
For the December Yota Month we just applied for the german DYM call. We hope to attract more youngsters this year and achieve a lot more QSOs. Furthermore we will have an activity map ready where youngsters can see stations throughout the country who are willing to open their place for the December month activity. Hereby we want to create a network throughout the German ham youth to get them on the air again.
Questions, comments or ideas? Feel free to contact us also via ham-yota@darc.de
73 de YOTA team DL
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