Special Event: USS Yorktown (CV10) Commissioning 75th Anniversary Day 0

Even though tomorrow is the actual day of the USS Yorktown’s commissioning, I thought I’d spend the afternoon in the club room activating WA4USN and get a few more contacts in for the special event. I was joined by two other hams for the afternoon.

Things didn’t quite go exactly as planned, but still went fairly well.

After spending some time figuring out the Yaesu FT-897 that was sitting where I expected the Kenwood 570 to be, I started calling CQ on 20 m. After a few calls, we (WA4USN) got a call over the repeater from a ham at a radio station set up at a nearby Boy Scout camp asking if he could put some Cub Scouts on the air with us for the special event.

Always a good thing to get on the air with Scouts, so we talked with a group of Cub Scouts (Webelos) and then got back to HF. Spent some time calling, and then another call on the repeater with another group of Scouts. Rinse and repeat.

After the third group or so, we decided to just give up on HF and spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Cub Scouts (I was too lazy to break out the headphones).

So even though there were no HF contacts today, I still consider it to be a pretty good day on the radio. Talked to 21 Scouts in total, mostly Cub Scouts. Many weren’t terribly talkative, but a few were downright chatty. Some of them learned about the Yorktown. All got exposed to radio and it seemed to have generated some interested at the camp.

Tomorrow will be all HF though.