Dave Kalter Youth DX Adventure
The record-breaking Dave Kalter Youth DX Adventure for 2025 is complete with 9,016 contacts. Everyone made it home safely, bug-bitten, sunburned, and exhausted! It was quite a successful trip with 4 youth, 2 parent/grandparent, and 2 trip leaders. What a great crew as the youth were very dedicated and spent a lot of time in the operator chair and giving each other breaks. At times, we had four radios on the air, but most of the time, only three. Continuous operations ran from 9 a.m.-9 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Monday, they operated from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. before going sightseeing. The plan was to operate from 4 p.m.-8 p.m. that evening, but we experienced a station issue caused us to go QRT. Luckily, it was easy for Uli, DL8OBQ, our station representative to fix but we needed to start packing (Images below).
When 40m was usable, we had the four radios on the air. Unfortunately, 10m was just a bunch of noise and no signals were heard. We did try it at the top of each hour from noon-4 p.m. All contacts have now been uploaded to LoTW, Club Log and QRZ logbooks.
While the contacts were great and the focus of the trip, there was a major and unique event. JoAnn Wagner, Ben and Agnes’ grandmother, was intrigued with Amateur Radio. She has attended Dayton Hamvention, other hamfests, and even ARRL headquarters witnessing the Wagner family operating W1AW. Agnes helped her find online training aides for the Technician License. She studied, asked a lot of questions, did flashcards, and took practice tests. A lot of studying was done and on Monday evening at 9 p.m. took the Technician test via a zoom online VE session. The result of her test was a passing 34 out of 35 questions! On Friday, July 25, she became a licensed HAM with a call sign of TBD. Congrats, JoAnn.
A huge thanks to Dayton Amateur Radio Association (DARA), DX Engineering, and CWOPS Foundation as our major contributors. We could not do this without the amateur community’s generosity.
