Straight Key Century Club December News, Cumberland Amateur Radio Club

Good Day,

This is a short story sent to your Editor by one of the members of Cumberland Amateur Radio Club.

The author, John WA3KCP, is an enthusiastic Morse Code operator. He recently participated in a monthly on-the-air event sponsored by the Straight Key Century Club. The theme changes each month, usually with some type of seasonal theme. The December theme involved Reindeer, Christmas characters, and Elves.

John describes the thrill of being one of the popular Bonus Stations that result is additional scoring points when making a two-way radio contact with the Bonus Station.

From WA3KCP, John

SKCC members volunteered to be bonus stations (12 reindeer/ Christmas characters, 25 elves). By posting operating frequencies on the SKCC Sked page, bonus stations could be more easily located and worked. This year I volunteered, for the first time, to be an Elf bonus station. It was great fun! Managed about 4 hours both Sat & Sun. Given this experience, I am checking schedule availability to take a first-time turn or two as a K3Y/3 station for the annual January K3Y SKCC event.

Ho! Ho! Ho! Happy to hand out bonus points for Elf and Senator, and really appreciated the SKCC Sked page for locating fellow elves. Helped me QSO all the reindeer, but just couldn’t work Santa. Avoided 28Mhz due to the int’l contest there. Tickled to stumble across VK2GR on 14MHz, otherwise got a few EU and the rest NA. First time performing as “Elfen John” after all these Dec WES events, and plan to sing that tune again next year! Wishing good health and much happiness to all my SKCC buddies, those I logged for the first time and those I seek out every month!

73s

John/Elf WA3KCP #11705S

Glossary:

VK2GR — the ham radio callsign of an operator located in Australia. Australia is one of the farthest away radio destinations for ham radio operators located near the east cost of the USA which makes it a particularly interesting achievement.

73 — Ham Radio shorthand notation for “Best Regards” .

SKCC — The acronym for Straight Key Century Club. The club promotes the use of vintage radio techniques, particularly the generation of morse code characters using a manually operated telegraph key and traditional shorthand abbreviations to convey information. In contrast, electronically generated morse code dots and dashes are frequently heard on-the-air these days.

Sked — a prearranged schedule in which to ham radio operations arrange to meet each other on-the-air at a particular date, time, and frequency.

K3Y/3 is a ham radio callsign assigned to the Straight Key Century Club. If you turn the number 3 around you will see it looks a lot like the capital letter E. In that sense, the

K3Y callsign promotes the use of a Morse Code KEY when transmitting. The “slash 3” is a designation for a call sign being operated away from its registered location. The planned operation will be taking in the Third Call Area District, which includes Pennsylvania, Maryland, District of Columbia, and Delaware.

#####