Beavers, Cubs, District, Event, Scouts

JOTA/JOTI 2016

17 October 2016

Once again, we’ve had great fun hosting JOTA / JOTI for the District at our Scout Hut.  If you’ve not heard of this before, JOTA is Jamboree On The Air, and JOTI is Jamboree On The Internet, and it’s all about providing opportunities for Scouts, Cubs, Beavers and Explorers to talk to other members of Scouting (and Girl Guide / Girl Scout) units all around the world.  This year is the 59th year that JOTA has run, and the 20th year that JOTI has run.

When JOTA was first set up, this was all achieved by Amateur Radio and this year, as so many times before, we had great support from Furness Amateur Radio Society, who put up a massive antenna and installed several “ham” radios at St. Perran’s Scout Hut.  Many of the young people present took the opportunity to talk to others all around the world by radio.

Nowadays, we don’t just rely on Amateur Radio to talk to other members of Scouting around the world.  Using computers, we can chat using the Scouts own text-based chat server (known as ScoutLink); we can talk to other groups using the “TeamSpeak” option of Scout-link; and if we have a really good internet connection we can try using Skype to arrange a group video conference.

This year, an internet café was installed at the hut for young people (and some not so young) to use the ScoutLink chat servers.  The computers and internet connection were donated for the day by local hydrographic survey company Furness Mapping Services.

Starting at 09:00 on Saturday morning, we kept the airwaves busy, and the world-wide web wobbling until 20:00 in the evening.  Young people from 17th Barrow, 1st/7th Barrow, 11th Barrow and 2nd Ulverston Scout Groups came along and spoke to the world!

Part of the JOTA/JOTI challenge is to share your unique location ID with other members of Scouting, and to record their unique ID.  For the event, our JOTA ID (or JID) was 5GB14B.  Many radio and internet conversations were held throughout the day, and we managed to record unique ID’s from 84 locations in 26 different countries!  As well as Scout locations, the amateur radio operators spoke to many other amateur radio fans around the world.

Country No. Chats Country No. Chats
Great Britain 29 South Africa 1
Norway 5 Denmark 1
India 5 Aruba 1
Turkey 5 France 1
Sweden 5 Portugal 1
Australia 4 Spain 1
Canada 4 Venezuela 1
New Zealand 3 Argentina 1
Malaysia 3 Finland 1
Czech Republic 2 Iceland 1
Ireland 2 Mexico 1
Greece 2 Malta 1
Bolivia 2 Cyprus 1

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