Another of the ham radio operators here in the area is Paul Crookston, KB7ZIH. He’s been directly involved in getting the new BYU-Hawaii repeater up and operational. Tonight he worked with a group of boy scouts on their radio merit badge. He took his radio over and had the boys talk with several others of us who were standing by. A couple of the boys expressed some interest and hopefully there’ll be a way for them to act on that interest. The Boy Scouts of America operates an excellent website, K2BSA.net, and has been activating a number of locations using the K2BSA portable call sign. In October the scouts will be holding their Jamboree On The Air event. We’ll need to figure out how to get some of the local troops involved in JOTA.
So, now that the J-Pole is up and operational, my Yaesu FT-8900 easily gets into the BYU-H repeater. In fact, both of my HT’s easily get into the repeater at 5 watts output into a better-than-a-rubber-duck antenna. Monitoring the repeater this evening shows some activity on the machine. However, there’s a LOT of QRM here. I’m going to ask him to put a tone on the output side of the repeater which should go a long way towards squelching the QRM.