Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Happy to join the Ham Radio 360 family!

I'm super excited that Cale Nelson K4CDN to has included my updated blog on list of syndicated sites for his new HamRadio360.com community.  I've worked with Cale in the past as a guest of his Fo Time Podcast, and he's a great guy - with content from George KJ6VU and others, I expect Ham Radio 360 to grow quickly, and I'm glad I can be a part of that.

Update; Hoping that the search robots will pick up the fact that http://sparqi.blogspot.com/ is now here - you'd think so since Blogger is Google..?

Thursday, April 7, 2016

New name, new look

Hi folks,

It's time for an update.  I've changed the URL of this blog, and given it a new look, in preparation for something which I can't yet talk about.  Suffice to say - it will be awesome.  I also fixed the problem with comments not displaying - beware of that Dynamic Views template.  Unfortunately, it looks like the changes caused all previous comments to disappear.  No matter - we move forward with anticipation of great things!

Friday, April 3, 2015

Kids and Amateur Radio

Did we manage to get a half dozen elementary school kids to pay attention to amateur radio?  Yes, yes we did.  How?

  1. We arranged to set up a demo table at their school Science Fair.
  2. We arranged to have young hams in nearby areas be on the air at that time, and had two young hams (one who attends the host school) run the radio.  We used a club callsign for the non-ham guests.
  3. We booked our local repeater system and set a NO ADULTS policy for the operation.  Kids would only have to talk to kids.  

Myself and another adult ham were nearby monitoring with HTs to ensure Part 97 rules were followed.  Was there silliness?  Yep.  Poop jokes?  Yup.  At one point they all made up tactical callsigns for each other like "Cheeseburger" and "Side Salad".  It was great to see them having fun like this.  I think I'm going to start calling myself "Fish Sandwich" on the air.

Did they sometimes forget to identify w/ callsigns?  Yes, and when they were gently reminded about the rules they towed the line.  And then we backed off and let them continue by themselves.

Result: I now have two 5th graders asking to get their licenses.  One kid came over, initially immersed in his smartphone, and ended up on the air - phone off to the side, forgotten.

Why did this work?  Because instead of trying to entice kids into our adult interpretation of amateur radio, we created an environment where they could encounter amateur radio on their terms.  It's simply not true that kids aren't drawn to amateur radio.  They're just not big on hanging out with adults.

Big thanks to +Beric Dunn for his support with this.