Between 1.15pm and 2pm today, I will be visiting some Y6 pupils (our new first years for September), and talking to them about amateur radio. As I have mentioned before, I have a timetable slot to teach about radio, including the Foundation Licence, from September.
I will only have a HH with me for these demos, so I will be using the GB3VT (Stoke-on-Trent) repeater. If anyone within coverage is available, I would be delighted if they could provide some activity on this usually quiet repeater.
Sorry I am not within range to assist but well done Tom and good luck for the presentation, its great to hear that Amateur Radio is being promoted to the younger generation.
Tom’s demo is going great guns, up to now he has worked from 5 classrooms and the main hall. Great stuff for amateur radio. He is now QRT for a Q & A session in the main hall.
Well done Tom.
It reminds me of my first encounter with amateur radio. Our Physics teacher (known as “Sloff” to us… don’t ask) took a class of students down to a shed with a wire strung out across the top of the woodworking department at the back of the school .
He gamely spent a hour or so rustling up a contact on CW (which, at the time, we thought was a mode that had gone with The Ark!) and eventually managed a QSO on what I now know as 80m.
Suffice to say I was interested enough to end up doing my City and Guilds exams a couple of years later.
Hope you try CW with them too Tom… your street cred. will be even higher!
Perhaps amateur radio ought to be mandatory in schools as a means of encouraging the younger generation to communicate by means other than texting and incomprehensible grunts.
It was a discarded TV chassis found by the school waste bin that got me into Amateur Radio - a friend, seeing me glean this article with its remnants of capacitors and carbon resistors, told me about the school club (G3PAW) and I went along after school the following Tuesday. Thanks to Ron G3JNK who taught maths and physics and ran the club, I never looked back. I was even given special dispensation to swot up for the RAE in school time. I hope the same level of interest is to be found in Tom’s school.
Now back in my maths classroom enjoying a rare non-contact period after rushing around demonstrating to six Year 6 classes in 30 minutes! From the indications and interest shown by the pupils, I am confident that my course will be easily over-subscribed in September; ie, it will go ahead. There might be an issue over what to do with the disappointed kids who didn’t get a place on it, but that’s a lesser problem than the one of not having enough interest.
All the visiting pupils had watched the 9 minute RSGB DVD “What is Amateur Radio?” as part of their programme of activities in the previous hour, and then I whizzed around doing about 4 minutes with each class, with my VX-7R until 2pm.
My grateful thanks to both the Macclesfield club and the SOTA fraternity, both of whom answered the call and ensured GB3VT repeater was “alive” at the time I needed it to be.
Sorry for the O/T - but it worked and got me what I wanted at short notice. I hope to be running some outings in summer 2009, with a minibus full of recently licensed M6 stations, to SP-015, SP-013 and SP-004. Now, where’s those risk-assessment forms…? Groan…
Thanks to 2E0PXW, GW0DSP, G0BIE, G3CWI and several more that I forget just now. I expect I’ll be doing this again, Friday afternoons in September, before progressing onto simplex, proper aerials, HF etc after then. But 1pm to 3pm every Friday afternoon will be our timetable allocation, and a continued enthusiasm to answer the calls from here, for demonstrations, greetings messages, Foundation practical assessments and from the kids’ own M6 calls, would be very much appreciated.
Doing appreciation of morse this afternoon. The pupils have all just completed their receiving assessment successfully, and have requested to watch me in a live QSO.
If anyone is up for it, I will call on 2m CW, 144.060MHz shortly.
Yes, it is. Now completed for six of the eight candidates. I need to catch up with the sending and the connection of the station with two absentees next week, one of whom needs to redo his receiving assessment. The main event next week should be the HF contact, so we hope to be QRV on 80m SSB for that.
Station M1EYP/P from Brownhills Maths & Computing College (school), QRV this afternoon from around 1330z-ish on 80m SSB. Hopefully around 3.660MHz, but could be on any clear QRG between 3.6 and 3.7MHz.
The students will be fulfilling a requirement of their Foundation practical assessments.
We are doing it “SOTA style” today, with a portable set-up out on the field. Wx looking better so fingers crossed. Will cancel if the wind/rain picks up.
Thanks to John G0TDM, Mike GW0DSP and especially Frank G3RMD for coming on to work my Year 7 Foundation licence students this afternoon. For most, the “demonstrate an HF SSB contact” was their final ‘tick’ on the practical assessment record of achievement form, so the children were all pretty pleased when they came back into the classroom.
I don’t have a proper HF antenna system to use with Shirley MW0YLS’s gear in the classroom yet, so we had to go out onto the playing fields and work “SOTA style”. The four girls couldn’t wait to get back into the classroom out of the cold, but the four lads wanted to stay out longer and help wind in the antenna etc.
When we came in, I completed the CW receiving with one, and the sending with two, which meant that the practical record of achievement tasks had been fully completed for all eight students. So from next week, it will be more traditional style teaching, exercise books and textbooks, but hopefully still with some on-air time on 2m after about 2.30pm each week.
The course is going really well, and the students remain interested and motivated. I aim to take them all out in a minibus for their debut SOTA expedition (The Cloud of course, it’s ideal) in the summer term if they’ve all been successful with the examination (I expect so, we’re taking a really long time over the course, so the learning is very thorough and always consolidated). And the classroom shack comprises the station equipment of Shirley MW0YLS, one of the SOTA world’s first ever Mountain Goats. Together with the continuing stalwart support of the SOTA community on-air, the link between this project and SOTA is very strong.
