School Visit Today

On the island the primary school visited me for an hour or so.  I offered the invitation to the headmaster to bring students to the "shack" to share the experience of working DX from an amateur radio station.

The students trekked from their school up the hill towards the QTH.

The path they took is almost a kilometer

The 26 students and two teachers walked the whole way. The students walked the entire journey barefoot -- no shoes -- just bare feet on the ground.  That is the "uniform" apparently?

They finally arrived at the QTH to meet me:

Notice the bare feet?

Anyway they all assembled and I had a brief chat about amateur radio.  I explained why I was on Lord Howe Island and what the general idea was -- to work as many DX stations as possible.

Soon the kids wanted to get on the radio and work DX!

The school teachers put the kids into groups of 6 and they came into the shack and we tried calling CQ on 15m.   Not much luck so I asked one of the older boys to give it a go, and call CQ (I had a feeling that hearing a child's voice call CQ would be the magic..)   Sure enough on the first call, we had a contact with New Zealand,  ZL1LU -- Bill.

After I prepared Bill for what as about to happen, I had to quickly explain the whole QSO process and the Phonetic Spelling aspect. 

I asked each student their first name and then I wrote out the script to follow.  For example when it was Max's turn, this is what I prompted him with:

As you might expect they were talking really fast so we had to do it a few times on the air with Bill slower and slower so that Bill could make a copy of the message.

The kids took turns in each group giving Bill a short message and they learned how to respond to the questions from Bill (ZL1LU) with Roger-Roger and so on.

We had a great time.  They peppered me with questions about the radio, and how the signal works.  We didn't get into the technical details as much -- but I pointed out that the Sun and the solar cycle of sun-spots plays a significant role affecting propagation.    They were a bit astounded at the signal on the HF bands -- how it was not clear and not "full quieting" as we would call it.

When it was time to show how CW works, they perked up and I sent a sample  CW of each of their names.   They lit up and started to chatter with themselves trying to mimic the CW di-dah.   I think among all of the students there might be one who will start their journey with amateur radio.  If that is true then Lord Howe Island may not be as "rare" much longer with an active resident -- but we will have to wait and see.

I was very impressed with the students, the teachers and the outlook of the class.  These kids are great examples of our future and it looks quite promising at this stage.

The WWDXC was ready to assist with a operator on 'the other end' and it would have been good to make contact with them, but the band conditions were sub-optimal at the moment we had with the class.

Thanks Bill, ZL1LU and the WWDXC for their assistance.