On Sunday, I received the following e-mail from a reader:
Just wanted to let you know I passed the General exam using your study guide. It was very helpful. I am now generally ignorant whereas before I was only technically ignorant. Ha!
My reply to him was:
Well, if you’re generally ignorant, I guess that makes me EXTRA ignorant!
This isn’t just a joke—being ignorant is part of the hobby. Amateur radio operators will always be ignorant about something or other. Even if you could master every facet of the hobby at some point in time, your mastery would be short-lived as the technology continued to advance.
Over the course of my amateur radio career, we’ve gone from equipment that primarily used vacuum tubes, to solid-state gear that first used discrete transistors and then integrated circuits, to software-defined radios. I could have, at some point, simply given up on the new technology and still enjoyed amateur radio. Some guys do that, and that’s OK. It is only a hobby after all.
I’m not one of those guys, though, and if you’re not one of those guys, then you have to resign yourself to being ignorant. But, that’s a good thing, as long as you realize that you’re ignorant. Realizing that you’re ignorant will spur you on to learn new things and accept new challenges.
Recently, I realized that I’m mostly ignorant about satellite operation. I know some of the basics from having read articles in QST and writing about the topic in my study guides, but I have never made a contact using a satellite. I think that might be one of my next challenges. With the advent of CubeSat, there are many new satellites up in the air and many more opportunities to have interesting contacts.
So, what are you ignorant about? By that I mean, of course, what’s going to be your next challenge in amateur radio?
DH7LM says
Hi Dan,
That’s the spirit! Seriously, just admitting that we don’t know many things and aren’t good at many things is a skill that seems lacking in today’s world. But hams know better!
For me, my biggest challenge are in good-old handy-man skills; I have two left hands. But if I look back at my 3 years in ham radio, I got a whole lot better at it – by failing and trying again and failing and trying again. I’m still not good at all, but there’s progress – and that’s the beauty of ham radio. No matter where we start with our knowledge and skills, we learn and grow.
Thanks for posting this + 73
Lucien / DH7LM
Dave New, N8SBE says
Funny, I was listening to the “This American Life” podcast on Aha, which I can stream on my Uconnect Access head unit in my truck, and they were talking about something called the “Dunning Kruger Effect” (named after the two researchers that discovered it). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
In brief, we are ignorant of what we are ignorant of, and in particular if one is particularly inept in some skill or knowledge, we tend to rate ourselves much more highly among our peers, while those that are very good at something tend to rate themselves somewhat more poorly, because they assume that everyone around them are just as knowledgeable.
Of course, Dunning Kruger has become the new Internet meme, if you want to call someone stupid, as in, “You are suffering from Dunning Kruger”.