Tomorrow (Sunday, March 16th, 2025), I’ll be participating in the Ham Radio Workbenches On The Air (HRWBOTA) event from 1800 to 2200 UTC (2 PM to 6 PM Eastern).
I’ll be operating QRP and portable, weather permitting, from a POTA site. I’ll mostly be using CW from 10 to 40 meters.
If you’re learning CW and feeling a little shy about getting on the air, this is an absolutely wonderful opportunity! As long as you can send your callsign, and recognize your callsign when I call you back, just send me a signal report, and we’ll be all set! I’ll happily adjust my pace to match yours, giving you all the time you need. It’s totally okay if you want to pre-program your CW message memories with your call and signal report. The key thing is to give it a try! I truly believe you can do it!
Note that I may not share my POTA location on the POTA.app spots page so that Ham Radio Workbench listeners don’t have to compete with the weekend POTA hunters. Plus, if my plans change, I might operate from a site that isn’t POTA, so there’s that too.
The HRWBOTA exchange is a little unconventional (and fun):
- Hosts give a serial number or standard POTA-style exchange.
- Listeners can optionally share the number and brand of their favorite soldering iron, plus their state/province/country.
For example: “0 Weller, North Carolina”
That said, again, it’s perfectly fine to simply give a short exchange with signal report and state, province or country. This is all about the fun factor, so a simple contact is fine (in fact, you’l find we hosts often forget to give the serial number in our part of the exchange!).
You can find all event details — including a live host tracker showing frequencies and modes — at https://hrwbota.com/