Remember the great old song, Get Your Kicks on Route 66? This Bobby Troup hit, recorded by dozens of artists over the past half century, urged a generation of post-war Americans to hop in the car and see the country by traveling Route 66's more than 2000 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles. It captured the spirit of freedom stimulated by the open road, and inspired many to hit the highway.

To offer hams a fun way to relive their own memories of Route 66, and to share the impressions of others, we put together the Route 66 On the Air event. The song names twelve cities and towns marking the traveler's progress along the way. Amateur Radio clubs were operating from each of these places during the special event period, 9 September (0000Z) through 17 September 2000 (2400Z), to contact as many stations as possible wanting to take part.

A really nice certificate (designed by Dan, KC7PRC) is available for $1.50 to any ham working at least one of these twelve Route 66 stations, with endorsements identifying all the special event stations the ham worked. (Click here for application to request certificate.) Note: This certificate is only for the 2000 Route 66 event. For the 2002 event, please go to www.qsl.net/w6jbt.

One thousand certificates were printed and almost all of them  have been issued to hams who applied. As you might imagine, this event was extremely popular (more than 14,000 QSOs were made), as well as substantially more complex than the usual special-event operation (since 12 separate special event stations were involved). Consequently, it took quite a while to gather logs from the participating clubs, combine them into consistent formats, etc. But we finally caught up with the backlog. Thanks for your patience, and we hope you enjoyed the event.

Each special event club station used a unique 1x1 call sign, and they operated in the neighborhood of the following frequencies, to make it easy to spot them:

In addition, Route 66 special event stations employed VHF & UHF simplex frequencies or repeaters in the vicinity of the twelve cities (frequencies vary), and also on WARC bands.

These were the special event call signs and clubs responsible for operating the Route 66 stations:

*QSL cards: Requests for QSL cards (not for the award certificate) should be sent directly to the sponsoring club for each station worked. Please include an SASE or a preaddressed envelope with an IRC. (Click here to see samples of the cards.)

For more information contact the Northern Arizona DX Association

Read all about the 2000 Route 66 event in the article in QST magazine.