Sunday, January 4, 2015 was ARRL Kid’s Day. I know that was like three months ago, but it was such a good experience that I wanted to make note of it.
I got down to the museum about 1:30 pm, and the first station I worked was K3NEM at the National Electronics Museum. He had a bunch of kids ready to go, and I wrangled some at the HOM to talk to them, and we just had a blast. We pointed our beams at one another, and we had a 59+ QSO both ways, and it just worked out great. We were in contact for about two hours.
I had planned on trying to operate digital voice, but that’s OK. Working Kid’s Day was a lot more fun.
The importance of junk
On the way to the museum this morning, I talked to Ed, KD8OQG, on the University of Michigan repeater, W8UM (145.23 MHz). Ed has been working with the RTL SDR dongles. His latest project involves hooking one up to a Raspberry Pi.
We talked about that for a while, but then he mentioned that another project that he was working on was cleaning some of the junk out of his basement so that his son could move down there. He noted that some of the stuff was quite old, but he was excited to discover it anyway. The reason for this is that in the meantime he’s actually learned how to use some of this stuff.
I’ve written in the past about the importance of junk in amateur radio, but this discussion put a whole new spin on it. Not only is it important to have junk that you know about and know how you can use it, but also just random stuff. At some point, as you learn more, you may discover a cool, new use for something in that junk box (closet?).
European special event stations on CW
When I fired up the rig, I found it tuned to 15m phone, right where we left it last week. Since propagation seemed pretty good to Europe, I left it right there and worked a DL and HB before switching to the CW portion of the band.
There, I worked a couple of special event stations:
- DL65DARC. This special event station is commemorating the 65th year of the Deutscher Amateur-Radio Club (DARC), the German version of our ARRL.
- R120RC. Here’s what’s on R120RC’s QRZ.Com page:
On May 7, 1895 a Russian physicist and electrical engineer Alexander Popov presented a device that received signals from the Hertz spark vibrator at a meeting of the Russian Physical and Chemical Society in St. Petersburg.This experiment demonstrated the possibility of transmitting messages over a distance without wires. In Russia and some other countries, May 7 is celebrated as the “Day of Radio”. In connection with the 120th anniversary of this event the SRR (Soyuz Radiolyubitelei Rossii) organizes and conducts the Activity Days “120 Years of Radio.”
I’m always amazed at how much progress we’ve made technologically in the last 100 – 120 years.