JOTA 2025

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Once again, the LARA Club gave back to the community by hosting our JOTA deployment at the L.L. Woods Park in Lewisville on Saturday 10/18/25.

During this JOTA we taught the Boy Scouts of America Radio Merit Badge to around 30 scouts from various groups that showed up. Thank you all for your participation in making this event happen, all involved had great fun and a great time.

Hope to see you there next year as well! Mark your calendars

73

Greg - KI5PDC

Thank you all who helped organize and operate during our JOTA/JOTI 2024 participation that happened over the weekend of October 18-20 2024. As always, it was a great success, and we are already looking forward to next year's event.

73

Greg - KI5PDC

Our local Lewisville Club, LARA organized and conducted the local JOTA/JOTI event this past Saturday, Oct. 16th from 10-4PM at L.L. Wood Park in Lewisville. 

We setup 2 HF stations, 1 VHF station and I setup a “Digital Ham Radio” demonstration in Jim Lavin’s BBQ Trailer. 

Our Scout totals were small due to other scouting events in our North Texas Area. However, we had 10 Scouts attend, including some young ladies. Four Scouts completed their Radio Merit Badge HF radio contact requirement and 3 were signed off on their Blue Cards. We reviewed their Radio Merit Badge requirements and helped them understand what ham radio is all about

We had 14 ham operators attend with 8 hams helping with setup and operation. . The “digital trailer” included easy Laptop to Laptop (acoustically coupled) Fldigi so they could “send/receive” PSK, RTTY and CW in the trailer without having to do full RF. Other demonstrations included several applications running on Raspberry Pi, including Ham Clock, Fldigi, FT8, Motion Eye and JS8call. A friend ham operator, Ferris Watson, WT5D came all the way from Rowlett to assist with the Raspberry Pi demonstrations. Mark Culross came from South Ft. Worth to help with HF. Our club members, Mike Rietz (organized this event), Ron Ford, Steve Klein, Marty Wells, Jim Lavin and others helped encourage young Scouts. 

Even though it was a light turnout, we had a good time,  “sort of doing a mini field day, ie JOTA/JOTI”.

Dale Finley, KB5NFT 

 For the fourth year in succession LARA participated in the World Scouting Jamboree-on-the-Air. The 2019 version was the 62nd annual event for World Scouting. At Conner Pavilion in Lake Park we had two HF stations, a VHF/UHF station and numerous digital mode stations. There were also several Radio Merit Badge Counselors on site to work on merit badge requirements with the scouts. 

Check out the Gallery page for pictures from the event.