Last weekend was the 100th anniversary event for the Penn State Amateur Radio Club. We sent out a press release to every newspaper in the area, and they all ran at least part of it. Well, everyone except the Daily Collegian, who never even returned my emails. You’d think that something as interesting as the 100th anniversary of a club on campus would warrant some space in their paper, but I guess they had more important things to report on.
Preliminary news articles and full press release here.
We started out on Saturday morning by opening up the station for visitors, while running our special event station. In terms of visitors, we had people from NASA and all around the local area, as well as Penn State professors and students. They all seemed very interested in what we were doing, and a few were even brave enough to get on the air. For the event, we used both the HF yagi antenna we already had on the roof, as well as a new inverted V that Professor Breakall set up just for the event.

HF Yagi and mount point for the inverted V

Inverted V
The special event station, K3PSU, got around 200 contacts over the course of the weekend, averaging 100 per day. Each one will be receiving a special QSL card we’re having made up. Here’s the prototype that the designer came up with:

Front of the 100th QSL card

Back of the QSL card
On Sunday, we had our foxhunt. I served as the fox, and was tasked with hiding somewhere on campus for the EE class and some other residents that decided to join in on the fun to find. I decided that the upper quad in West Halls was the perfect location, so I set up my folding chair and settled in for the afternoon. It took about 20 minutes for Professor Breakall to find me, and then another half hour or so for everyone else to make it there.
All in all, an excellent weekend. QSL cards should be printed soon, and then sent out as soon as the station logs are completed.