Scout O Rama 2005 Article

By: David Clark KD7NZK

A few weeks before this year's Scout-O-Rama Scotty (WA2DFI) came up with the idea to built code practice oscillators and give them away to the scouts to gain interest in the post. He laid out a schematic and decided we could do it with six surface mount parts, a speaker, and a battery mounted to a piece of wood. The plan was to solder on all the surface mount parts and then let the scouts finish it by mounting it the piece of wood and soldering a few wires on.
We generously got one hundred circuit boards donated to us and several other parts. At the Explorer Post 599 meeting the Tuesday before the event we set up an assembly line with five soldering stations and had each person solder one or two components on the board. After getting set up we started cranking them out every couple of minutes. We ended up with forty-nine working at the end of the night, and Saturday morning we finished up the last fifty-one.
After that we spent the day helping the scouts finish up building them and fixing a few malfunctioning ones. With one hundred surface mount boards being hand made by several inexperienced solderers in less than three minutes each you can't expect perfection, but after some trouble shooting we managed to get them all functioning. At the end of the day all the circuit boards were given away to the long lines of people waiting for there turn.
We set up two stations to help the scouts, one to help solder on the wires and one to help screw the board to the piece of wood. It took between ten and fifteen minutes for the scouts to get one put together on average, so the lines outside our booth were quite long at times. On the plus side we didn't have many to give away compared to the number of scouts there so the long wait in line helped limit the number of people.
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Last Updated: November 23, 2005