The St Petersburg’s Science Fest returned to Poynter Park on the USFSP campus in downtown St Pete this past weekend. It was a rare chilly morning but with a clear sky it made for a very nice day. SPARC members Bob N2ESP, Dee N4GD, Charles W4BPP and myself Pat AA0O ran the booth. I brought my Parks on the Air mobile HF setup, Yaesu FT-891 with 20m wire dipole on a 40ft Spiderbeam mast. This weekend was ARRL Int’l DX CW contest so we found a very strong signal from 9A1A in Croatia and turned that up to attract folks to the booth. Most were very surprised to find we could receive a signal on a wire from that far away.
Many of the kids that came by had never heard CW before and were very interested in trying it out on our straight key code oscillators. One boy came back around 4 times, he couldn’t get enough. Another YL and her mother came back and her mother said it was the only booth she wanted to revisit.
