Exploring the Czech national museum
Our day began with the usual routine of having breakfast followed by a crucial team leader meeting. Today’s meeting held extra importance as we prepared for a day with varying schedules. You might remember that we divided everyone into six teams named after known Czech scientists and pioneers. These teams came in handy during our workshop rotations on Saturday. Today, the system was put into action again as three teams embarked on an exciting excursion while the rest of us stayed on campus for following the activities here.
Originally it was planned, that the groups Křižík, Wichterle and Ressel are going on a excursion to the city of Prague. But as the weather forecast especially for the morning was pretty bad, we had spontaneous program changes. In order to keep all the participants dry, we went to the National Museum, located on Wenceslas Square. The museum was quite recently renovated, so visitors could enjoy beautiful exhibitions – Windows to Prehistory, Wonders of Evolution, Crossroads of Czech and Czechoslovak Statehood. This way, we could not only deepen our general education but also learn a bit more about the Czech Republic. After the museum we had an hour walk around Wenceslas Square and went back to our accommodation with the Metro of Prague.
While three teams were out exploring the city, the remaining groups, namely Mendel, Diviš, and Purkyně, dove into some hands-on fun with kit building. We tackled two exciting projects: the first being an antenna kit. This kit was perfect for both experienced and novice builders, as it was simple, but yet not only a soldering project. It started with winding the ferrite core with the right number and arrangement of the windings, soldering the few necessary components onto the PCB board and building the setup for the guy ropes from Mastrant. The PCB board was cleverly designed to accommodate the antenna wire and guy ropes, making it an ideal companion for portable activations on the 40m, 20m, and 10m bands. After lunch break, it was time for the second kit building project. More about that will be in our blog post tomorrow!
Building the antenna kit
As some experienced youngsters were pretty quick, there was no chance for them to get bored at all! They either eagerly helped the beginners with building their kits, some organisers that were still busy with checking the logs of the off-air contest or used the opportunity of a less crowded ham shack to get themselves on air! As time past by, our three groups came back from the excursion and we were all reunited at the accommodation such that we all had dinner together.
The day was already getting to an end, but the program was not even finished yet. We had one more round of the team presentations, where we got to know more about the youth circumstances and activities in some participating countries. As this ended at 21 o’clock, there was the possibility to continue the day even further, as two participants were able to held an American ham radio licence exam for those that were interested to do so. Some took this opportunity (Congrats to everyone that passed!), while the rest was just hanging out with some of their new international friends before everyone went to bed soon.
