JOTA - October 17 & 18

BSA Council List - Print and use this list to help your JOTA program. Use your council number when making contacts.

Find your local BSA council by using the Local Council Locator. Enter your zip code, to find your local council

The Idea

It all started in the fall of '07 during Jamboree on the Air, JOTA. My local camp, Muskingum Valley Scout Reservation, is a mouthful to say over the radio. Especially using morse code. Many scout camps around the country have names that are easy for the local scout/ham but troublesome for the out of town visitor on the airwaves. So an idea started to form. Why not assign an ID number to each camp like IOTA has islands? All B.S.A. councils are already assigned a number so half of the job is done.

Here are some ideas that we have put together.

1. We don't want to make it cumbersome to administer, so that we can keep it free. Along that line, if we expand outside the US we might have a volunteer coordinator for each country to assign ID numbers. To begin, a voluntary registration system will be used.

2. For a camp numbering convention, the following is possible:

a. International standard country data processing code; USA, FRA, GBR, as a prefix?

b. The BSA already has numbered all of their councils. (see link above) Muskingum Valley Council's number is 467.

c. Letter suffix for each council's camps beginning with A. The suffix "T" (temporary) would be reserved for multi-unit gatherings (Council or district camporees, "rallies", Cub Scout Day camps, etc.) held at parks, etc. The "T" suffix would be reused for any temporary event within a council. 467A for Muskingum Valley Scout Reservation.

d. For National or World Jamborees, the identifier would be the 3 letter prefix of the country hosting it followed by the 4 digit year. For example the recent World Jamboree in the UK would be GBR-2007, and the last BSA national one would be USA-2010.

e. This system does not replace the use of a callsign for the station. Following regulatory laws is the responsibility of the station operator.

3. We will promote the core principal of Scouting to the ham community and not require physical QSL cards or checking. A Ham would simply certify that "On my Honor, I have made the following contacts with Scouts, Guides or Scouters at the following Camps and thus qualify for the SCOTA 10 Award" (or whatever). They would submit their application electronically via the web and get a color PDF of their award to print locally in return. Thus no postage or costs.

4. Contacts only count if the ham talks to a registered Scout, Guide or Scouter at the camp. Thus a non-Scouter ham who wants to "activate" a camp will need to offer the local Scouts a chance to talk on the radio instead of just running it like a contest.

5. Offer an easy award of 10 camps to start with endorsements at 25, 50, 75, 100, 200, etc.

Needs

- A person with artistic ability for logo design.

- Person able to use PHP and MySQL for the database application

- Other needs to be determined.

Last updated 5/20/09

All logos and trademarks are the property of their respective copyright owners. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.