Progetto YOTA - English - ARI SEZIONE DI VERONA

Thursday 24th of january was an hard but very funny night for the Youngsters of Verona

What happened? That night was the first International YOTA NET of 2019 and it was completely organized and managed by a group of YOTA guys with basecamp in Verona

But what is a YOTA NET? This event is an on-the-air scheduled event with the main goal of creating a night or simply few hours to share ideas, experiences or even just to meet up with your friends

How did we create this event? When we found out that we got to kick start the first YOTA NET of the year we got extremely happy but even a little scared: we all wanted to do our best but we really had no idea on how to do that, so we sat around a table and we discussed a lot on how to get this night useful and funny!

We decided the time schedule of the event, which ham band to use, who we needed to get the work done, which callsign to use (it was IQ5YE, a special callsign created for these YOTA events), the main argument of the night and how to get the whole discussion more interactive. To get the “interactivity” point we decided to ask our friend Luca IU3BXI to create a special web-page with a really user-friendly look, this page was needed to view the real time QSO LOG, share the main contents of the QSO and even ask for a schedule or QSY, we really wanted to create the dashboard as a well-oiled machine to stick together the passion of ham-radio and an online chat-room to reach as much users as possible

The YOTA Team: the group was composed of Luca IU3BXI, Nicole IZ3XAK, Alessio, Massimiliano IU3IPY, Francesco IU3GNB and our friend from Mantova, Luca IU2FRL.

What was the main subject of the first YOTA NET of 2019? It was something not so simple: “How to increase the interest of young people for amateur radio”, this subject is part of the goal of the international

So, which were the expectations and results? We thought that the night would be quite calm with just few QSO but we got extremely surprised when we got so many people calling even from the first moments of the night! We got a lot of youngsters calling for us and even a lot of non-youngsters forming a big pile-up, it wasn’t easy to get around this huge amount of people: some of them just asking for a fast QSO, some others interested and answering to our question. The idea of the chatroom got a little abandoned because people did not expect to receive our answer, in some case the language was a problem, some others were not prepared to ask our question that was in fact really simple but the answer needed some time to think about it, apart from that we were really happy to hear all those operators from any part of the world and even some Italian friends!

Expectations were a little different from the results but for sure we will use this experience to improve ourselves!

Why we did that? Because we like to get involved in this activity, to test ourselves and spread our ideas!

So, how do you sum-up the night? According to the ham radio operators that answered our question, to increase the passion and the interest in ham radio we should:

A big thanks to the possibility that the IARU R1 gave us and in special way to our representants Silvio IZ5DIY and Alex IV3KKW but even to Fiodor IZ7YBG, the ARI-Verona ham-radio club IQ3VO that gave us the radios, the antennas and all the material needed, to Marino IW3ILT that advertised this event created for young people, to all the boys and girls that made this possible such as Luca IU3BXI and Luca IU2FRL, Alessio, Massimiliano IU3IPY, Francesco IU3GNB and even to Andrea IZ3MZS that was helping us during the event supporting us in the critical moments, last but not least we would thank all the operators that contacted us, that gave us few seconds to complete the QSO, to answer our question, discussing this subject that is really important for us!