After a fun day yesterday, the last day of winter YOTA started with a fun energising game. Day 3 was “QRM day”. The day kicked off with a presentation about sources of QRM by Edwin Vos PA3GVQ, it was fascinating to see how a small fault in a power supply for example can cause significant QRM. But this knowledge would be useless without knowing how to locate the source and being able to prevent the QRM. Furthermore, we learnt how to best work together with your neighbours when complaints about interference come up. Edwin works for the Dutch telecommunications agency, so he knows QRM better than anyone.
After lunch we took the traditional group pictures with all participants. The afternoon activities were started off by a treasure hunt. The youngsters had to answer amateur radio related questions in order to find the location of the next question. For example: “Which country has the most DXCC entities?”. The weather was “Dutch dry”, it only rained lightly but this did not stop the youngster’s enthusiasm. Then it was time to continue with QRM day. First of all, the participants built a signal finder kit which can be used to detect sources of QRM. The instructions can be found on www.kitbuilding.org. For many it was the first time soldering such a kit. It was great to see the more experienced youngsters helping the ones who had less experience. Once the kit had been assembled a test bench was set up to try out the detectors. At the same time Edwin demonstrated the vehicle used by the Dutch telecom agency to find QRM sources, both for amateur radio and commercial operations. The sensitive technology and directional antennas were impressive. Yet another career in amateur radio.
The day ended by the participants presenting what they had done and learnt to some of the camp’s sponsors, more about this in tomorrow’s blog.
