A couple of day ago, Steve, WG0AT, who is a big Summits on the Air enthusiast, tweeted:
Yesterday we had lots of tourist-hiker visitors wandering by wondering What the Heck we were doing? So I passed out a few of my WTHcards (inspired by Stuart/KB1HQS)
He attached this image:
Stuart, KB1HQS, referred to above is a big Parks on the Air guy, and the author of Portable Operating for the Radio Amateur. Here’s his card:
Both of these are great cards. I don’t have my own card, like these two, but I’ll often print up a flyer to hand out when I’m operating portable. Here’s the flyer that I passed out last year when I activated the Pointe aux Barques lighthouse:
In retrospect, I see that I should have included more contact information.
In any event, these are great things to have when operating portable. You never know who might get interested in the hobby. Heck, they may even end up as good friends.
Excellent idea! Quite often on a SOTA summit I experienced that hikers asked me what I was doing, but in the middle of a pile-up, with earbuds in my ears, I was not able to respond immediately. Usually I ask them for a few minutes of patience, but most of them just walk away.
73, Markus HB9BRJ
I set up on the picnic table outside my RV this past weekend with my KX2 and Bioenno battery, running 5W into an Eagle One antenna mounted on the back of the RV. As folks strolled by, usually walking their dog, I got at least a few howdys and in one case, a neighbor camper stopped and we got into a long conversation about ham radio. She kept coming back to “why?” would I do something like that. I guess she couldn’t see the draw. She was maybe in her 30’s and had no concept of things like the ionosphere, but talking about Skywarn and showing her my FM/DMR HT seemed to strike a chord. I finally told her that I was eternally curious and that ham radio allowed me to learn something new almost every day. That seemed to finally satisfy her.
Later, I set up my telescope out back of the RV to see if I could capture Neowise, the comet. The woman that had been talking with me previously, was sitting around their campfire with a couple of other folks, and I kept hearing her tell them knowledgeably “that’s the radio guy”, when they starting remarking on my telescope setup.
I guess she had been talking about our previous encounter. I guess you never know what kind of impression you might make on someone you meet by chance while playing “radio”.
Instead of WTH card, I have a whole 17 pages of “WTH” manual for explaning what I’m doing, Why I’m operating legally and “I won’t do any harm to you and the nation”. XD