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blog:2023-05-10:beavers:cubs_battleship_event

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Beavers/Cubs Battleship Event

This past Monday and Tuesday VE7ETC, VA7ILO, VE7QCB, and VE7RBE put on a radio oriented event for the Cubs and Beavers respectively.

We met at Cliff Gilker Park and made use of the covered picnic table. We started with a dipole that VA7ILO made. The reception was good as we heard stations from around the USA including Boston. We were not able to be heard by VE7TBN so we put up VA7ILO's JCP-12 vertical antenna. We were able to talk with VE7TBN with the JCP-12.

We started with a short talk about the EM Spectrum and moved into modulation. The intent was to show at a high level how we use radio waves to communicate. The kids picked up the concepts pretty well. Then we had a QSO with VE7TBN, listened around the 20m band, and showed decoding FT8 signals. Unfortunately, on Tuesday with the Beavers, we were not heard by VE7TBN.

We then spread out around Cliff Gilker Park and played Battleship. Each team had a control operator that helped with using the radio and moving the game forward. The kids picked up using the radio quickly and even did some trash talking about the game over the air. A side effect of the game using alphanumeric grid coordinates was that we were able to introduce the phonetic alphabet to more clearly communicate the coordinates.

With the Beavers, we reduced the size of the board and the number of ships to simplify the game for them.

The kids had a great time and at the end of the session were asking if they could do the game again sometime.

We do have some ideas for further events with the Beavers, Cubs, and Scouts and will hopefully be able to do events several times a year with them.

blog/2023-05-10/beavers/cubs_battleship_event.txt · Last modified: 2023/05/10 15:01 by ve7rbe