Steve Bonine wrote:


If I may interject here, I think we may be treating people as a group
more so than individuals.

Some of those people in your class may just want to fire up the repeater
and chat.

Some of them may just want to do emergency comms.

Some may want to build stuff.


Very importantly though, they may not know until they are exposed to it.

When I first became a Ham, my interests were in applying the hobby to my
other hobby, amateur astronomy.

After that, I joined a club, and went to FD. I operated Field day with a
control OP. I thought WOW! this is a lot of fun. So I went for my
General Test. After Struggling with Morse Code - it is not easy for some
of us, I got my General Ticket.

Then I discovered Digital modes, and a whole new part of the hobby
opened up for me.

I kept on discovering things, the latest being how enjoyable HF Mobile
is. I built my own bugcatcher, and have been surprised how well it
works, given the low efficiency of mobile antenna setups.

My point here is that I discovered a lot of things about Ham Radio that
I didn't expect, and they became the focus of my hobby.

Oddly enough, I never integrated Amateur radio as I had originally
planned to, in Astronomy.

Don't sell the students short. Some of them may indeed just want to
"pass the test". But by exposing them to a little of the different
aspects of the hobby might just awake something in them that they didn't
know existed.

Some thoughts for demos:

Obvious ones like the repeater operations.

An FT-817 with a miracle whip might be just the ticket for demonstrating
SSB, CW and Digital. With all the "hot" setups out there, a less than
mediocre setup such as this will still be able to make QSOs with.

I'd suggest going from FM to SSB to PSK-31, to CW, just to keep things
lively. Could be done by bandwidth, with an explanation of how the
smaller bandwidth signal tends to get across better. It's always good to
have a sked setup with another Ham in case propagation is bad.

- 73 de Mike KB3EIA -