KD5NWS Introduces Royal Rangers to Ham Radio

Charles O’Dell KD5NWS has one wish for his boys in Royal Rangers: a ham station at every Royal Ranger Pow-Wow in the United States.

Pow-Wow is a camp-out held once a year throughout the U.S. In June 2011, the Oklahoma-Southern Kansas-Northern Texas regional Royal Rangers' Pow-Wow was held near Bell Cow Lake near Chandler, OK. About 5,000 boys attended from all over the country. The boys participate in paint ball, swimming, hiking, and blacksmithing. They learned camping and other skills.

O’Dell set up a Ham station at the Pow-Wow to promote Ham radio to the boys and range leaders.

“It was a great success,” O’Dell said. “The boys and leaders were very interested.”

The boys made contacts with 50 other hams and one in Canada. Dolph Grolock KB2AW of Luther, OK, helped set up and took photos of the event.

Royal Rangers is an outreach of the Assembly of God church; however, many independent churches sponsor Royal Rangers programs as well. A boy can join by attending a meeting. He does not have to be a member of the church. In addition to local meetings and events, Royal Rangers sponsors a National Camporama in Eagle Rock, Missouri.

O’Dell has been involved in Royal Rangers since 1963.

If you would be interested in helping with the Ham station next year, please contact O’Dell at KD5NWS@aol.com.

Pink HAMsters Dinner Fellowship

Pink HAMsters is having its first, monthly, dinner fellowship at 6:00 pm on Thursday, July 28th, at Panera Bread, 81st and Aspen in Broken Arrow, OK. For more information, see the Pink HAMsters Blog.

Pink HAMsters, founded by Cindy Downes K5CED, is ham radio from a feminine perspective. The members get together on ham radio, online and in person. All are welcome.

Not just press releases

With the Internet and social media, the ability for a club public information officer to get the word out about their local club activities is greatly enhanced.

Tips for using online news outlets for Public Information Officers are:

1.  Find your local media pages.  Every newspaper, radio station, and TV station now have web pages.  Many of them offer local calendars.  Add your club meetings and special events to those pages to enhance the chances that the media will cover your event.

2.  Craigslist and Ebay both have community sections where one can announce club activities.  Is the club planning a special event?  Does the club want visitors to know what the club is talking about at the next club meeting?  Bookoo is a new site on the scene with local pages opening frequently.

3.  Don't forget Twitter and Facebook. Many of your local media already use these tools to promote to their customers.  Following them, you can also announce your activities.  This, too, may increase the chances that your event will receive media attention.

4.  Blogs like this, WordPress, and LiveJournal offer the ability to make a club page at very little cost.  This can be exploited to Twitter and Facebook through a variety of feeds.  The output of this page, for example, automatically update the Twitter feed at @ARRL_OK with no additional work past setting up the feed.  If you set up pages at all three, one post on one can update the other two using a feed.  One would certainly consider setting up club sites on all three, even if only one is used, in the case that someone might set up a bogus page on the other one.  Don't forget to include your Twitter feed on your blog.

5.  Email lists like YahooGroups and GoogleGroups are great for sending one email to reach local members.  YahooGroups even has a calendar that would allow club members to input their special dates, ex. birthday, anniversary, holidays, in addition to the club events, assuming, of course, the group is closed to non-members.

These are just a few ways to leverage the online tools for the Public Information Officer.  It's not just about sending a press release once per month any more.  It's becoming increasingly more important to give the person on the street access to information that will make them want to be a ham radio operator and participate in your club activities.