Announcing the Third Annual Flight of the Bumblebees

To join the list of Bumblebees, send Russ Carpenter, AA7QU, an email expressing your wish to serve your country as a Bee. russ@natworld.com As always, we are holding a lottery for the first 25 Bees to sign up. This year, as last, we will be giving away two subscriptions to Backpacker Magazine.

There is a slight change to the rules this year. Our experience has shown that almost all participants in ARS events file their logs on our Autologs. So, no more paper logs for the Flight of the Bumblebees.

Here are the rules.

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This is a four hour event during the last Sunday of July, running from 10:00 PDT/11:00 MDT/12:00 CDT/1:00 EDT to 2:00 PDT/3:00 MDT/4:00 CDT/5:00 EDT. Thus, the hours of operation accommodate all four time zones. No matter where you live, there is time to for the Bumblebees to travel to their sites, set up their stations, operate the contest, and travel back to their cars.

Both home-based and portable operations are encouraged. Participants who want to operate in the Bumblebee category apply to Adventure Radio Society for Bumblebee status. ARS assigns each Bumblebee a Bee number. Bumblebees agree to walk, bike or boat to their sites. The distance traveled to the site is at the Bumblebee's discretion. Bumblebees add "/BB" to their calls.

Group operation is welcome in the Flight of the Bumblebees. You may operate under a single call and report a single score, or under multiple calls and report multiple scores. In any event, you are limited to operating a single transmitter at a time.

Maximum power is five watts. We operate CW on 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters, on the standard QRP frequencies. We want this to be a national contest, so we encourage long-range contacts by giving double points for 20, 15 and 10 meters. 40 meter contacts will receive one point. The same station can be worked on different bands for additional QSO points and multipliers.

If you are a Bumblebee, your exchange is RST, state/province/country, and your Bumblebee number. If you are homebased, your exchange is RST, state/province/country, and your power.

Contacts with Bumblebees generate a 3X multiplier. So your score equals QSO points times (number of Bumblebees times three). Here is an example. If you make 20 contacts on 40 meters and 30 contacts on the higher bands, and make a total of 25 Bumblebee contacts, your score is (20+60) X (25 X 3), or 6,000.

Separate but equal commendations are awarded to the high scores for the homebased and Bumblebee participants. We will also commend Bumblebees in the following categories:

• Most interesting equipment,
• Most outrageous venture, and
• Most beautiful site.

Participants are strongly encouraged to use our automated contest reporting system, which is found in the ARS Sojourner. Participants may submit paper logs, with a two week deadline. Results are posted during the third week of August in The ARS Sojourner, the QRP-L Internet Group, and by direct email to ARS members.

You are encouraged to submit stories and photographs of your Bumblebee adventure for publication in The ARS Sojourner. See Advice for Contributors.

Russ Carpenter, AA7QU, is the Contest Manager. You can reach him at russ@natworld.com