Yota Italy never gives up! At the end of february we got stuck in the lockdown due to the Covid-19 situation, it wasn’t easy to stay at home for more than two months but we managed with no problems at all, most of the youngsters are students, which, of course, were stuck in their houses and we got to find something to do! here are some of our activities:

1. YOTA NET

The YOTA NET event is already a tradition of the international team, it’s a special evening where we meet over the air to spend some time together, we thought that the lockdown would have been a great event to do a NET! We first started in 40m band but at that moment they were unusable, we also tried 20m and 80m but with no success at all… the only way was to use one of the biggest ham radio repeater in north Italy that provides coverage of the whole north area (IR3UX) with a live stream of the NET on the Discord platform in order to let all the youngsters able to listen the big QSO that born in that moment, we got more than 20 non-Yota operators that came to salute us. Success!! Read more….

• Maker Faire Rome

From 17th to 20th of October 2019 in Rome there was the biggest Maker Faire in Europe and YOTA Italia had the opportunity to participate presenting a new project to be used in case of emergency: a suitcase which provides you the ability to communicate and control remotely items using the satellite Oscar-100. The kit is composed of an ADALM Pluto, a small amplifier and a Raspberry-Pi, the kit is able of receive and transmit in full-duplex mode using a small dish and we hope to have it fully working during the next year.   During the same Faire we were also streamed live to the national radio broadcast station “Rai Radio 2” talking about amateur radio hobby and how to become an ham-radio operator. The faire was a great success and we had a lot of new young people involved in our team. Read more….

The Italian situation is quite stable and waiting for the new national committee to set up (we had ARI committee election in this summer), the group of youngsters has slightly increased with a new member from Bologna. One of the goals of the new committee is to change some details in the way that ARI sees the YOTA project and the youth in general, they created a “radio club” allowing all young guys (YOTA, Scouts and school) to take part at the ARI events. The next step (we hope) will be to make a dedicated reduced fee to take part of the national association, as for today is quite expensive (around 70 euros). The summer was mostly dedicated to the preparation of the LZ19 camp, we then had a meeting in Prato (the hometown of Amelia IU5LVM – the Italian lady that went to the camp) explaining the camp, the activities that has been done and our feelings after the camp. Read more….