AmateurRadio.com

My search for a way to generate more young hams has taken a strange turn. My original goals were to (a) provide a solid excuse for our hobby to be kept alive, despite the pressures for our valuable spectrum by rapidly expanding commercial interests and (b) help provide the high-tech work force our country is going to need to compete against the other industrial countries.

If we’re going to do this we have to get kids interested in hamming. This brought me head-to-head with the mess our schools are in. And that, in turn, got me to reading about our educational system. I’ve found that I’m not alone in criticizing our schools.

Now, before I get really started on how lousy our schools are, let’s just consider what you might do if you were interested in having the very best child or grandchild you could. First, let’s talk about what can go wrong, and then we can discuss how to fix the situation. I’m presuming, of course, that you might have a shred of interest in giving your children the best start in life that you can. Maybe you don’t give a damn. Many parents obviously don’t.

By the time your kids are seven the largest part of their characters will have already been formed. The child at seven won’t be very different fundamentally from the teenager at 15, or the grown-up at 30. Maybe you’ve seen the movie they made about that. If not, rent it.

Your child starts with the sperm and the ova. Anything you do to screw up your DNA before conception is going to affect your kid, and not positively. If you mess your sperm up enough, there’ll be a miscarriage. But a lesser disturbance of the DNA message will just burden your child with problems. There may be health, behavioral, or even cosmetic birth defects.

So what can we do to give our kids the best possible start? Well, research has shown that there are a lot of things that affect our sperm. There are drugs such as caffeine, nicotine and alcohol. There are magnetic fields such as we find with electric blankets or living near power lines or power sub-stations. There are poisons such as mercury, silver, and nickel, which we can get from amalgam fillings in our teeth and inoculations, such as for flu. Most of us already know about crack babies, and terrible problems from cocaine, pot, and the hard stuff.

So let’s say that you and your wife go out of your way to give your kid the best start you can. Then comes birth. I’ve got to get you to read The Continuum Concept by Liedloff. That’ll keep you from letting the hospital put your baby in their nursery. This is a wonderful guidebook for the first year of life.

Next comes the pre-school era from one to five. This is a time of incredibly rapid learning. It’s a wonderful time to teach babies several languages, if you have a way to continue and develop their use later on. Use it of lose it.

Unfortunately, even if we’ve done everything the best we can until we send them to public school, this is when we can permanently screw up the rest of their lives. I hope I can get you to get the book by John Gatto, the New York State Teacher Of The Year, Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. It’s inexpensive and a humdinger. Of course, since you are an alumni of this school system, the chances are great that you do not have any interest in reading books. Do you know that the average American schoolteacher only reads one book a year. And then, even if you do read Gatto’s book and get all upset when you find out what’s been going on in schools, you have been so conditioned by your own school experience so the odds are that you have been made into a gutless wimp and won’t have the initiative to even try and do anything about it.
Heck, I’ve discussed the major problems facing our society and proposed inexpensive, creative solutions to them in my Declare War book. Several thousand people have bought it, yet I’ve seen no movement to try and implement any of my proposals. “It can’t be done. It’s hopeless.” Until I read Gatto’s book I hadn’t realized why I was getting verbal and written support, but not seeing any sign of people actually doing anything.

I was around eleven when it finally dawned on me that kids had no more rights than slaves. By law I had to go to school. The only rights I had in school were those the authorities let me have, and they have been backed up by the Supreme Court in this. I was forced to comply by the use of embarrassment and humiliation. You do nothing unless the teacher tells you to—which stifles thinking and makes you dependent on the teacher. I see this pattern in most of the youngsters I’ve hired, who are unable to think for themselves. They sit and wait until they’re told what to do. They are unable to plan work. They’ve always been stopped before finishing something by the bell, so they’re not familiar with the concept of completing work.

Gatto says, “It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves.”

Gatto points out that it only takes about one hundred hours for a person to learn to read, write and do arithmetic, as long as they’re willing to learn. From then on they can teach themselves. “Schooling, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified teacher. Nobody survives the curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it—don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education.”

He points out that before television children had enough time to themselves to learn about self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love. Now kids, on the average, spend 55 hours a week in front of the TV. That’s one-third of their time. Add to that the stresses of a two-income or single-parent family, and our kids have too little time to learn to become human.

Is it any wonder that our engineering universities are running out of potential students, and are having to continuously lower their admission standards? Only 7% of the high school graduates in America have enough math and science background to be accepted by an engineering college. The colleges have responded by turning to foreign students. That’s great for other countries, but it sure leaves ours in a fix. Here we are heading into a high-tech future and we’re turning out fewer and fewer American engineers, technicians and scientists.

The time was, 60 years ago, that youngsters wanted to be hams so badly that they’d put up with learning the code as a barrier. I did, even though I hated being forced to do something which did not make sense to me, even then. Very few of the kids these days have the passion to surmount obstacles, so we’ve instituted the no-code license. Well, we’ve been lowering the standards for school grades in order to get our kids through school, which is the same thing. They’ve even had to lower the SATs because our kid’s scores have dropped so much. Now I see some hams pleading that we lower the technical exam standards so kids won’t have to memorize so much to get a ham license.

There may be some American schools that are pretty good. I’ve read about a few. But most of the better educated children today are being schooled at home by their parents. Maybe you’ve read about it in Newsweek.

Home schooling will be a lot simpler once we have a good video educational series parents can use. These would use top-notch performers, plenty of graphics, and be fun to watch. PBS has been producing some superb educational videos. Now we need to have them to cover everything being taught in the K-12 years, plus everything that should be being taught. And also plus everything kids might want to learn, but which aren’t being taught. We need thousands of these videos.

We’ll still need schools to provide the hardware and facilities to teach skills. You can teach a lot about driving with a simulator, but then you need a car. Ditto flight simulators, etc. You can’t learn to juggle with a simulator, or to throw a boomerang. Or do glass blowing.

College? There may be some that are okay, but if you read the books on education you’ll find that most aren’t much good. Most of the “teaching” is done by student instructors. Get a copy of Thomas Sowell’s Inside American Education, 2003, Free Press, $25.

If you learn much about nutrition you won’t let your kids near a McDonalds. Granted, it’s difficult to get the facts on nutrition. The field is overgrown with fads and scams. But if you want to raise healthy, happy, intelligent children, you’d better learn.

Though it’s far from perfect, the best school I’ve found so far is the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Mass. Here’s a school that accepts children from 4 through 20. It has no curriculum! No classrooms. No tests. No grades. The kids learn what they want, when they want, and if they want. The results are spectacular. I’ve read eight books about the school and visited it personally. It turns out that kids, if give the opportunity, love to learn and run circles around those forced to take courses. My Secret Guide to Wisdom reviews the books about the school and explains where to get them. I wonder what I might have been like and accomplished in life if I’d been able to go to a school like that.

It’s been a very busy week for me both at work and at home following my vacation, so it’s taken me a while to find the time to start writing this. I’d hoped to provide a few more updates while I was in Costa Rica but I never found the time so I’ll do my best to try to remember what happened. I’m going to try write a number of shorter postings so hopefully I can get them all out over the next couple of days.

In my last posting, I’d talked about how it had been rainy all week. That weather continued, but I finally did figure out a way to get on the air for more than 10 minutes at a time.

The problem was that my initial setup was on part of the outdoor deck with everything exposed to the elements. I would have been happy to bring the feedline inside, but the air conditioning system in the house we were staying at has sensors such that you can’t leave the sliding doors open even a little without the system shutting down. Considering the temperature and humidity, that wasn’t a realistic option, so I had to operate outside and hope for the best. In the picture, you can see the antenna in the background and I’ve got the power supply sitting on the chair with the radio on a little table. As long as it was dry, this worked out fine. Unfortunately, it didn’t stay dry long enough for me to spend any significant time on the air.

On Friday afternoon, the weather was once again uncooperative, and I was starting to think that I’d wind up leaving Costa Rica with only about 5 QSOs. However, Sharon pointed out that the deck next to the common area of the house had a pretty big overhang, and I realized that even with some of the really torrential downpours we’d had that area had stayed dry. I moved down to that location and set up the antenna there, configured for 15m, and brought out the rest of the gear to the new location.

Sure enough, after a few minutes of respite the skies opened up again, but although the antenna was getting wet, the radio, power supply, and my iPad (used for logging) were dry. (As you can see from the photo, I did have a towel ready, just in case.) I got on 15m at just about 21:00Z and called CQ and was answered by a station in Brazil. Being in Costa Rica, that wasn’t quite the DX that I was hoping for, but very shortly after that I got spotted on the DX Clusters and started getting a lot of calls from Europe. All told, I was on the air for about 40 minutes (we had plans and I had to get ready) and worked 33 stations that day. (I’ll have some details about the countries I worked in a future posting.) Although I’ve worked from a DX location before (as ZF2DK), this was the first time that I ever had what I would consider to be a full-blow pileup. I think that I did fairly well in managing things, managing to at least get enough of a partial call so that I could respond back with “the station ending in xyz only please” on almost every call. I don’t have enough experience yet to be able to pull full callsigns out of a pileup every time, but I know that’s something that comes with experience. By the second day of running stations, I could tell that I was doing better.

Part 2 of this series continues here.

In a comment to one of my posts on my other blog, Roger G3XBM wondered whether exposure to materials used in electronic construction such as PVC, lead solder, flux etc. might have contributed to my having a malignant brain tumour. I have never worked in the electronics industry and it was mainly during my teens and in the last few years that I have melted solder to any great extent. I suspect my exposure has been quite a lot less than that of professional engineers and many other hams, so personally I doubt this is the cause, though I guess it could be one of those things like smoking and lung cancer where if you’ve done it at all you increase the risk.

The other thing Roger mentioned was exposure to RF. This was something I kept on thinking about during the days I was in the hospital bed staring at the ceiling. Could using antennas in the attic a few feet from my head have caused the tumour to develop? Or perhaps it was using hand-held VHF radios?

With the logic of the ignorant I was inclined to dismiss the fears. I have never been a particularly prolific operator and only in the last couple of years have I run more than 10 watts to my attic antennas. I suppose my liking for digital modes may have increased the strength of the RF fields I was subjected to. 40W of PSK31 is probably a more intense exposure than 100W PEP of SSB.

As a right-handed person my HTs are usually held on the right hand side of my face – the side the tumour was. Coincidence or not? On the other hand, most people on the planet use mobile phones far more than I do and they aren’t all dying of brain tumours. Would doctors use radio waves to kill cancerous tumours if exposure to RF caused them? I don’t know.

Mike G4GOC found an extract of an article “Increased mortality in amateur radio operators due to lymphatic and hematopoietic malignancies” which appears to suggest a link between RF exposure and myeloid leukemia. So I guess getting as much distance between yourself and a transmitting antenna is always going to be a good idea, hard though that is to achieve for people living on postage stamp sized plots like so many of us on this small island.

There may be no proof that anything I did in pursuit of my hobby contributed to this brain tumour, but ever since returning home and getting some of my interest in ham radio back again I have felt uneasy about being close to an RF field. Yesterday I took the K3/100 and the Kenwood 50W 2m rig off the shack desk and put them away. Perhaps I’ll have a change of heart but it’s going to be QRP for me right now. If I could go back in my life and do anything different that would have avoided getting this brain tumour I would do so. I just don’t know for sure that carrying on as I did before won’t harm my chances of beating the bugger or at least keeping it at bay for a while longer.

Welcome to Handiham World!

It looks like we will meet our goals for Radio Camp this summer. We have a healthy level of participants, and most have completed their paperwork and made their travel plans. Quite a bit remains to be done in preparation, though. We have an excellent tower and beam antenna on a hill behind the camp’s “Rotary Building”, where we plan to set up an HF station using a Kenwood TS-570SAT and a TS-2000. Having these rigs to choose from should help make more operators comfortable. Since the beam has not been used this past year and things have been moved around, I will need to locate the rotor control box and dress the wiring back into the shack for a test run. One thing I have learned about antenna systems over the years is that unexpected problems can show up at the most awkward times. It pays to do a little footwork in advance. In this case, I will need to do real footwork, too. The main Handiham Headquarters building rests in a storybook-like clearing surrounded by forest at the base of a hill. Built on and into the side of the hill is the Rotary Building, named for its benefactors, the Rotary Clubs. Long ago, when the Handiham System was very young, there was a ham radio station in the Rotary Building, which was used during the shorter “May Convocations” that would ultimately evolve into the full-fledged Radio Camps.

So you can imagine that there would need to be an antenna system near the Rotary building, and sure enough, there was. A 50 foot self-supporting tower and beam antenna were installed up at the top of the hill behind the building. The entire system fell into disrepair when the Radio Camps moved to Courage North, and it wasn’t until recent years that the antenna and wiring were refurbished as part of an Eagle Scout project by Peter Widin, KC0ENI. This excellent resource will once again be used at Radio Camp, and should provide us with the opportunity to work some real DX! What is different this year is that we plan to install a permanent station in the library of the Rotary building, an excellent gathering space with plenty of room for operating skills participants. In preparation for the use of this area, I have completed the installation of wireless Internet and done some preliminary planning of the station setup. Although we could set up temporarily as in the past, this year we will have one of the familiar equipment desks that we have used at Courage North. This cabinet will provide a place to lock up the stored equipment when non-ham radio users are in the space.

Meanwhile, back on the Woodland side of camp, which is where we will enjoy living in the modern cabins during the week, I have checked the Internet and done my walk through of the buildings. I am thinking that we may have only one HF station, if that, set up at the Woodland cabins. After all, we will have stations on the pontoon boat, at the Rotary Building, and at the Headquarters. We do plan to have a JAWS computer with Echolink and the Remote Base software available as a training tool. Since there are wireless Internet hotspots available in Woodland, the Rotary, Lakeside dining hall, the Lakeside Gazebo, and Handiham HQ, there should be no shortage of places for us to use the Internet-enabled stations. Furthermore, the camp repeater will be on the air and it is Echolink-enabled. One of our goals is to teach the use of these new tools to as many of our campers as possible. If we are successful in getting our new IRLP node that has been configured by Lyle, K0LR, set up on our Woodland Internet connection, we will be able to use that to connect to IRLP node 9008, the Vancouver BC system.

By the way, this month marks 60 years since the FCC created the Novice class license. I was reminded of this by Ron, K3PID, my co-editor of our local radio club newsletter, who was asking club members to send in stories about their Novice days. I thought that was such a good idea that I would like to steal it, so how about some of those Novice stories? I will tell you one of my own next week.

Thanks for your support!

The Owatonna Steele County (Minnesota) Amateur Radio club recently sent in a gift of $50 in support of the Dr. Dave Challenge Grant. Dr. Dave Justis, KN0S, has challenged us to raise at least $5,000, which he will match.

Help us win the Dr. Dave Challenge!

More levity from our friend Burt, K1OIK…

Okay, so we managed to take a two month hiatus and we didn’t even know it was going to happen. Happen it did, though. Because of that, Episode #062 and #063 will have some dated information but most of it has been edited out and the stuff contained within that will be timeless has been left in.

I (Russ) will admit to shirking my duties to some degree. Many things are going on in my life right now and I just didn’t want to deal with editing or recording of late. Richard has also had his share of life problems and we’ve both been out of pocket a few times between Episode #061 and now. I suspect our absence is coming to an end and regular production of LHS will soon resume.

Thanks to everyone for hanging in there with us. We now return you to your irregularly scheduled podcast.

73 de The LHS Guys