The Radio Club were delighted to put on some radio related activities for the local Beavers as part of their  celebration of  Beaver Day.
The theme of this year’s Beaver Day was the Beavers 30th Anniversary.

We manned a base providing Morse Code practice, two-way communications using handheld radios and a wide game featuring QR Codes and smartphone QR Code readers.
Great fun was had by all, not least the Radio Club Scouts.

During the day two of our members, Kai MM1AUF and George GM8YUI, were presented with their Chief Scout’s Service Award by Peter, the District Commissioner.

The Radio Team – Bob, Eunice, Steph, George and Kai.

Kai on the Key

This is how you do it!

You just tap it like this.

Codes on a phone – what next?

Kai, Peter and George.

Today a huge parcel of letters arrived from the New Zealand Brownies after our TDOTA contact. How wonderful and what a nice surprise.
This is what Guides and Scouts are all about, developing links and understanding between people.
Makes you feel great to be part of such wonderful organizations.

Hot on the heels of our New Zealand adventure we were invited to participate with a group of Brazilian Scouts on their Echolink reflector. The net controller did a wonderful job of translating from English to Portuguese. Although we have been warned, in a very friendly way, that when we next make contact they will be expecting to hear a few Portuguese words from Scotland!!! Language lessons on the cards.

Our TDOTA operations this year have been restricted to using Echolink due to the illness of most of the operating team.
There has been a particularly bad respiratory ‘ bug’  circulating in the local community and unfortunately the radio team was not immune.

We had organised  an Echolink sked with a Guide group in New Zealand and decided to carry-on with it, after all both sets of operators had carried out tests on the link over the previous three weeks and we were not going to let a little ‘bug’ beat us !!!
However there were still a lot of crossed fingers on the day. Our apprehension was unfounded and the link was made without any problems.

All this was soon forgotten when we made contact with  ZL1SA and spoke with 21 brownies, 2 young leaders & a guider from their camp at Pukekohe in New Zealand.
We had a great time passing and taking greetings messages. We were also joined on the air by Liz Jones M0ACL the UK coordinator who contributed to the conversation.

Here are some photographs of the participants.

The New Zealand Team

The Scottish Team

The Pukekohe Brownies

Talking with Scotland