On Saturday, I taught yet another one-day Tech class. It was supposed to be the biggest one yet. I generally like to limit the number of students to 20, so that the test session doesn’t last forever, but the response was so good that I enrolled 22, and then put several on a waiting list.
Unfortunately, the weather here, like in many parts of the Midwest has just been crazy, and Friday night was no exception. We got about three or four inches of snow overnight, and six of the students were unable to make it. A couple of them tried, but I-94, the freeway they needed to take to get to Ann Arbor was closed in a couple of spots due to accidents. They got stuck in all that traffic.
One thing you might notice about this class is that the average age of the students is lower than the average age of the ham population. Most of the students in this class were in their 20s or 30s. Some were from the local hacker community. Some were college students. Who says that amateur radio doesn’t appeal to younger people?
There was a group of five or six guys who were all friends. One of their buddies who already had his ham license paid for all five of them. That was pretty cool.
When all was said and done, fifteen of the sixteen who attended passed the test. And, the one who failed missed it by only one question. So, overall, a pretty successful class this time.
After the test, three of the students went up to the shack at the museum to take pictures. Ovide, K8EV, was up there operating the station, and put them on the air. I caught up with them as we all were leaving, and they were all pretty geeked about making their first HF contact.
11 Qs on a snowy Sunday
Sunday’s weather was not much better. That made it a good day to stay indoors and operate my own station. I made 11 contacts overall on Sunday, including:
- a couple of South Americans on 10m,
- W1AW/2 and W1AW/5, and
- a couple more DX contacts on 40m in the evening.
The W1AW contacts were kind of amusing. I heard W1AW/2 calling CQ on 10108 kHz, listening up. Except that he wasn’t listening up. He was S9 here in Michigan, so I knew that he should be able to hear me, but after several CQs, it was apparent that he wasn’t hearing anyone. So, guessing that he wasn’t really listening up, I called him on the transmit frequency, and sure enough, he came back to me. He seemed a bit embarrassed that he had forgotten to turn on split operation.
A bit later, I ran into W1AW/5 on 30m and worked him. After tuning around a bit after that contact, I switched to 40m, and guess who was my first contact on 40? W1AW/5, of course! They’re in the log right next to one another.
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