K4GTM: Armed Forces Day Special Event Activity

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Armed Forces Day Special Event Activity

We had an absolutely great day at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum today operating our radio station WW2COS to celebrate Armed Forces Day. I always look forward to these opportunities to raise awareness of our B-17 restoration project. We set some records this time around in several areas. Before the event we posted info about our upcoming activity at http://www.qrz.com/ and we had 480 hits. That means 480 people saw information about the project before we even started today. Over the course of about 7 hours on the radio today we made contact with 54 stations in 17 states and one Canadian province. Two of those stations were also operating special event stations to celebrate Armed Forces Day. With each contact we took the opportunity to explain the details of the "City of Savannah" story and specifically the radio compartment. During the event today we also leveraged Facebook and Twitter to update our status and frequency. Once again we broadcasted a live video feed from the compartment so that folks all across the country could watch us and get a view of the inside of the aircraft. I wrote a message that scolled across the screen showing our current operating frequency. This is always a big hit and this time we had a record 50 people view the video feed. That's 50 people "virtually" inside the radio compartment with us enjoying this great piece of history!

Todays radio operators included myself, K4GTM, Bill-K4WP, Greg-W5GKB, Peter-KJ4FAW, and Paul-KC2NYU. What a great time we had. Big thanks to Jeff Hoopes for having the aircraft electrical ready for us and to Gil and Justin for thier work on the QSL card board.

**BONUS** We had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with a B-17 radio operator who was visiting the museum today with some family members. Didn't get his name but he's visited the museum several times.