2023 will be celebrated by ARRL as “The Year of the Volunteer.” More information will
be available throughout the year as the details are confirmed. However, the first
adventure has been announced as a project called “Volunteers On The Air (VOTA).”
Here we get ‘points’ for each contact made with another ARRL volunteer.
So, if two ARRL members contact each other, they will each receive a point for that QSO. No
special codes, sequence numbers, or section information needs to be passed. Make
contact with a fellow ARRL member, and you each receive a point. Each of you must
upload the contact to the Logbook of The World (LoTW), and your points are calculated
when the QSO is matched. This could be an FT8 contact, a CW contact, a simplex 2M
FM contact, an RTTY contact, or an SSB rag-chew.
To add more interest to the year-long operating event and help demonstrate the ARRL
volunteers’ value, each level of volunteer activity has been assigned a point level,
shown in the table below. For example, if you make a contact with Mark Kleine N5HZR,
the Oklahoma Section Manager, you’ll get 175 points for that one contact. So, I’ll need
to up my HF game to handle all the pile-ups coming my way in 2023. Maybe I need that
160M sky loop and an amplifier.
My mother has told me that whenever I did something ‘extra’ or for someone else, I
would “get points for that.” I’ve heard those words for over 60 years, and I’ve not yet
figured out what those points are worth. In this case, I’m hoping you will be able to get
some certificates, or wallpaper, for your efforts. More details on this as they are fleshed
out.
So, get your HF gear running, make sure your LoTW connection is working, and see
you on the air!!!
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