Professor Portable (Colin VK2JCC) demonstrating HF comms in the VK2MB shack

Held this year over the weekend of the 16, 17 & 18 October 2026, the MWRS has again hosted the usual JOTA activities at the Society’s meeting site at Terrey Hills.

Over 100 Scouts and Guides camping at a nearby school dropped in to the club house on the weekend. Activities were Build a Radio Station, Morse Code, Operating HF in the club shack, and of course Radio Battleships. We also had Build a LEGO kit by Remote Control as a backup, but not enough people to run that activity.

Dom VK2JNA and Scouts playing Battleships via radio with others up in the Scout hall

Every year the kids get to build a simple electronic project. This year it was a simple digital watch kit, available from Ali Express for as little as $1.49!

The kids had a lot of fun doing the build, and most were proudly sporting their creations at the club house afterwards:

Details of previous year’s kits are here.

Club President Simon VK2YU had this to say:

The whole day and a half went off very well and I was able to spend some time talking to a few leaders on Saturday and handing out business cards so we may see a few requests for further Scout group nights in the next few months which would be great.

All groups were pretty well behaved and a number of them had already done some of our activities in past years so my thoughts are to perhaps introduce some new ones next year just to have a bit of variety. The LEGO one is definitely something we can work up and run through to practice as something new.

Colin was able to make some good contact with VK2OP who were operating out of the JOTA camp in Coffs Harbour. I had a report from Carmel VK2NO mentioning the Vampire had a very good signal into VK2OP in Coffs Harbour also.

I reached out to SGARS club mid morning Saturday but they had a hard time making contact from their QTH at Kurnell as well as 800 kids at their site that also included a Youth Camp as well as JOTA.

And very fortunately the forecast rain decided to have the weekend off and gave us two great days of dry which made it easy to maintain Des’ Build-a-Station activity outside as well as baggage and kids movement on site.

The 2026 JOTA onsite team were:

VK2’s:

  • Richard ARH
  • Brian AXC
  • Craig BTQ
  • Andy EAH
  • Angus GUS -A ring in Scout (and our newest member) who assisted Richard SKY and Craig BTQ with “on air” contacts.
  • Colin JCC
  • Dom JNA
  • Richard SKY
  • Sean THT
  • Simon YU

Thanks to Dr Phil on Sunday morning who missed the weekly broadcast to be our contact on the 2m repeater.  

Thanks to Robert Drake for the visit on Sat morning and opening up the Scout hall for us.

Thanks to Des for the Build a Station setup and the handhelds. We did use the handhelds a little so great to have them available for the weekend. For next year 4 would be a great number to have on hand if possible.

Thank you to Jeff MZZ who had done all the ground work leading up to JOTA.

Dom even managed to sell a car by remote control while running one side of Battleship including a test drive!

Finally again thank you to everyone for their support prior to JOTA in tidying the hall and the Working Bee. The hall and grounds looked great for the weekend. A few scouts wanted to get the “gigantic” fire going but I had to inform them Tim wasn’t available unfortunately.. 

I’d propose we should perhaps do a review of the weekend sometime soon and makes some notes for planning next years weekend. If the onsite team has any feedback please pass it on to myself and I will collate it all and Jeff MZZ and the team can have a chat about it further.

Thanks again everyone who helped make the weekend a very successful one.

Related: How we do JOTA at MWRS. Get some ideas for the next JOTA.