We organised a communications event for the whole group (that’s Beavers,
Cubs, Scouts and Explorer Scouts).
The objective of the weekend was to see how many contacts we could make
with Scouts around the world. We painted a large map of the world and
secured it to one of the walls in the Scout Hut. As each contact was
made, a pin was placed on the map. During the weekend we made more that
one hundred contacts including Scouts in Australia, Bangladesh, Chile,
South Africa, Angola. Iceland, Canada, and most countries in Europe.
We were most grateful for the services of the Shefford Amateur Radio
Club. They erected two large masts in the ground at the back of the
Scout Hut and installed their equipment in one of our mess tends. All
the boys who attended the weekend had the opportunity to speak on the
radio. This was the JOTA weekend, which is the Jamboree on the Air and
we were allowed to register a special call sign, GBOSSG for the
weekend.
We also managed to connect the computers in the Scout Hut to the
Internet for the weekend which allowed up to joint JOTI, which is
Jamboree on the Internet.
The Scout Association had set up a number of moderated chat rooms to
accommodated different languages. This allowed Scouts from all over the
world to converse through the typed word, with each other in their
native language. Once or twice we ventured into the French chat rooms,
but could not keep up with the conversation, so returned the English.
There was also a voice chat server set up which allowed boys to speak in
the moderated chat room to other Scouts around the world. This was
extremely impressive and exciting. There was a delay in the dialogue as
the sound was buffered, but experience was very rewarding.
We also had a web cam running for the whole weekend, which took a
picture every half minute. This was relayed via our web site (http://www.stotfoldscouts.org.uk)
so parents and friends could get a glimpse of what was going on, and
more importantly, it allowed us to direct our contacts to the web site
so they could see what we were doing.
This meant that having “talked” to our contacts in Australia (say) by
radio or Internet chat; they could then log onto our web site and look
at us waving at them via the web cam. I call that amazing!!
Nick Peace Assistant Scout Leader. |
