School Club Roundup - February 2017

W1HLO participated in the ARRL's School Club Roundup (SCR) this February. It was the first time for many of our members to participate in this contest and an opportunity for practicing our QSOs on the mic. We recently acquired an [Ameritron AL-80B]http://www.ameritron.com/Product.php?productid=AL-80b) amplifier, which has worked wonders for our station. With the current band conditions, it's been very difficult for W1HLO to make contacts with our wire dipole on the roof of the Cranston building. Now with the linear amplifier, we were making contacts left and right during SCR. Our problems went from "nobody hears us, Dr. G" to picking out stations in a pileup and trying to copy callsigns from a three-four RS!

We were only able to operate for about an hour ����and half during SCR and we made a respectable 12 contacts. To kick things off, we contacted a W1HLO alum, K1ZZ, Dave Sumner on 10m. We then switched to 20m and ended up with the following stats:

Phone QSOs: 12
States: 7
VE Prov/Ter: 2
Clubs: 1
Score: 132

Lauren had the club's best distance for a station during SCR -- over 1300 miles from W1HLO to Winnipeg, Manitoba!

Unfortunately, nothing heard from our past W1HLO president, W1GIV, George Main. He was operating his University's station, W9NAA, for SCR but not until later in the evening!

Maybe next year, we can do some RTTY with our Commodore 64 in the shack (hint, hint Peter and Marcus)...

Here is a video clip of our activity on our YouTube channel: