It’s been a fast-flying summer and the activities the JSCARC members had hosted for the JSC Student Interns. Here’s a fast recap and update:
Licensed hams
During this summer, Faheem’s student ham committee successfully licensed 5 new hams:
- Stella KJ5LYT
- Max KF8ENQ
- John KF8ENS
- Kellen KJ6LYU
- Jacob KR4FHZ
With an upcoming licensing exam this Sunday, hosted by Tanner W9TWJ, we’re hoping for potentially 4 more students getting licensed before the semester tour ends.
Soldering 101
We collapsed our usual soldering kit activity by offering either a beginner or advanced kit build at the same time. The beginner’s kit is a 2 LED blinker with 2 transistors. The advanced kit is a Digital LED FM radio. To our surprise, 90% of the interns jumped at the advanced FM radio kit. Lessons learned:
- Needed to have an already completed FM radio to be used for references of parts placement and chassis assembly
- Needed 2 or 3 dedicated sessions to build and test
- Use of 1 sacrificial kit for lost or broken parts replacement
They all had a great time and learned a lot about parts, parts mounting, soldering, desoldering, solder bridges, solder joints, polarized parts, resistor color code. Over 6 hours, only 3 finished. The others will have to finish at their own time as homework. Jacob has a few minutes afterwards to make a QSO on 20m SSB.
But the finished FM radio is very cool.
Ballooning 101
John AB5SS graciously rolled out a beginner’s ham radio ballooning activity for the interns.
The concept of using a ham tracking beacon and flying it on a “space vehicle” was an experiment to see if we could attract more interns from the overall pool. The Rocketry intern group always seems to appeal to more interns because of the notion of space launch and control, so the thought was why could this balloon project do the same.
Over the course of 4 DIY days, John created 2 teams to program and build up ham radio trackers (beacons) based off the QRP-labs tracker, U4B.
Work is in progress, but the teams have already programmed and assembled 2 working trackers along with ultra-light solar cells. We’re awaiting a potential launch this week using John’s specially prepared mylar balloons. More on this project in a separate blog post.
JSCARC support team: AB4ME, KJ5JIO, AB5SS, W5OC
