For everyone
You can just turn up
No licence. No ticket. No idea what any of this means — that is completely fine, and honestly it is our favourite kind of visitor. Here is what a Saturday afternoon in the field actually looks like.
Walk in, look around, ask anything
There is no front gate and no programme you have to follow. You will find a field with a cluster of tents, a lot of wire in the air, and around a hundred people who are visibly delighted to be there.
Start at the Welcome Tent. Someone will hand you a site map and point you at whatever sounds interesting. From there you can wander into any tent you like — the operators genuinely want you to look over their shoulder, and none of them will mind being interrupted.
Give it an hour and you will have seen everything and made a radio contact. Give it an afternoon and you will have sat through a couple of talks and eaten with us. Stay past dark and you will see the part most visitors miss.
The GOTA station exists so that you can talk to a stranger three states away
GOTA stands for Get On The Air, and it is a station we set up purely for people who are not licensed — or who are licensed but have never worked up the nerve.
Here is how it goes. You sit down. A coach sits beside you and explains, in plain language, what is about to happen. They hand you a microphone and tell you exactly what to say. You say it. Somebody in Colorado or Ohio or Nova Scotia answers, by name, and your contact goes in the log.
That is it. It takes about five minutes, it is free, there is no test, and there is no wrong way to do it. Nearly everyone is shaking slightly and grinning by the end. Children do it. People in their eighties do it. It is the single reason a lot of people are in this hobby at all.
Five stations, five completely different things to watch
Each tent is doing something distinct. You do not need to understand any of it to find it interesting, but here is what you are looking at.
Why there are so many tents doing seemingly the same thing
Bands are like lanes
Radio has different frequency bands — 80, 40, 20, 15, 10 metres and up. Each behaves differently depending on the time of day and the state of the sun. The 40 metre band is quiet and local in the afternoon and wide open across the continent at midnight. Choosing a band is choosing who you can reach.
Modes are like languages
Voice is people talking. CW is Morse code, still in daily use because it cuts through noise that would swallow speech. Digital modes let a computer decode signals far too faint for a human ear. Same radios, same antennas, wildly different feel.
Why it changes after dark
Radio signals bounce off a layer of the upper atmosphere that thickens and thins with sunlight. As evening comes, some bands close and others suddenly reach thousands of miles. This is why the site feels like a different event at 1 AM, and why people stay up for it.
Sit down, learn something, no commitment
The education tent runs talks all weekend, aimed squarely at people who are new. Recent favourites include getting your first licence, building an antenna for under twenty dollars, and what actually happens to communications when a city loses power.
Next door, the learning tent runs hands-on workshops. The soldering bench is the one to watch for — we will teach you to solder and you will walk away with something you built, and most first-timers at that bench are about ten years old.
There is also always an Elmer on duty. That is our word for a mentor, and their entire job is answering questions at whatever level you ask them. Nothing is too basic. Bring the handheld radio you bought and never figured out.
Food, camping, kids, and what to put in the car
There is food, and it is good
Saturday dinner comes off a grill and Sunday morning is pancakes and bacon, both cooked by volunteers for everyone on site — visitors absolutely included. Coffee runs all night. If you have dietary needs, tell the kitchen crew and they will sort you out. Donations at the food tent help cover it but nobody will chase you for money.
You can camp
Overnight camping is part of the tradition. Bring your own tent and bedding, pitch it in the camping area, and you get the 2 AM shift, the sunrise, and the pancakes. It gets properly cold once the sun goes down — every single year somebody is surprised by this. Bring a warm layer.
Bring the kids
Practice Morse keys, a soldering bench, antennas to stare up at, and a field to run around in. Children are welcome at the GOTA microphone and are usually braver at it than their parents. There is no charge and no minimum age — just keep an eye out for guy lines, which are the one genuine trip hazard on site.
What to bring
A camp chair if you want to sit through a talk, sunscreen, a water bottle, closed-toe shoes if you fancy helping with setup, and a jacket for the evening. That is genuinely the whole list. Everything else is provided, including all the radio equipment.
Accessibility
The tent areas sit on level grass and we put accessible parking as close to the operating tents as the venue allows. If you have specific access needs — mobility, hearing, anything else — email us before the weekend and we will make sure the route and the seating work for you.
The tables around the edge are worth your time
Each host club sets up an exhibit showing what it actually does the rest of the year — repeater networks, emergency communications, mesh networking, kit building, and licence training. It is the easiest way to work out which group you would enjoy, and every one of them is looking for new people.
Photos from the field
Visiting questions
Know before we do
The 2027 site announcement, the schedule, and the talk line-up all go out to the mailing list first. A few emails a year, and nothing else ever.