The annual Route 66 On the Air Special Event will take place September 10 – 18, 2022. The purpose of the event is to commemorate the history of the “Mother Road” connecting the east and west United States.
Now in its 23rd year, the Northern Arizona DX Association (NADXA) started the event, which is now coordinated by the Citrus Belt Amateur Radio Club (CBARC) in San Bernardino, California.
There will be 21 stations with 1×1 call signs on the air from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California, all with consecutive calls starting with W6. NADXA will operate three of the 21 stations, including W6G (Flagstaff, Arizona), and W6S (Arizona Rover 1). They’ll set up at various spots along Route 66 east of Flagstaff, and W6T (Arizona Rover 2) will be set up in Bellemont. Later in the week, the event will be moved to Parks, on old Route 66, west of Flagstaff.
The history of the Mother Road began in 1926, when US Highway 66 was established. It was the first major improvement to the link between the west coast and the nation’s heartland. Through stories, songs, and TV shows, the highway came to symbolize the freedom of the open road, inspiring many to see America in its entirety. The demise of Route 66 began in the 1950s, as construction began on the new interstate highway system. US Route 66 was officially decommissioned in 1986, but today, small portions of the highway still exist in several states.
For more information on participating stations, certificates and decals, and the Route 66 On the Air Special Event, visit the Citrus Belt Amateur Radio Club (CBARC) and Northern Arizona DX Association (NADXA) websites.
A translation of the DARC post reads:
“Solder Smoke” is the story of a secret, after-hours life in electronics. Bill Meara started out as a normal kid, from a normal American town. But around the age of 12 he got interested in electronics, and he has never been the same. To make matters worse, when he got older he became a diplomat. His work has taken him to Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, the Spanish Basque Country, the Dominican Republic, the Azores islands of Portugal, London, and, most recently, Rome. In almost all of these places his addiction to electronics caused him to seek out like-minded radio fiends, to stay up late into the night working on strange projects, and to build embarrassingly large antennas above innocent foreign neighborhoods.
