Ham Radio, Unschooilng, and Interests... So Many Interests

Here's how it all starte.d This morning, I trudged out to the park with the little RockMite radio (a single frequency ham radio transciever that oerpates at 14.0577 MHz, we'll get to how I can be that certain soon), and started plunking out Morse code in hopes of reaching someone else on the same band. The view was gorgeous, and before too, too long, I made the second contact I'm made in over a decade with WKJ7LVZ in Moab, UT! All of that was great! Also, the scenery over the antenna was pretty gorgeous.

And here's where the unschooling interests start. First, the kids help me setup the antenna sometimes. They're aware that it's a half-wavelength dipole They've worked with waves both in Physics and electronics because of my partner and I. At the moment, they're learning Morse code. So, they're getting all the peripheral stuff you might expect from ham radio.

Guess what else though?They're fascinated by the distances to the stations Icontact, and that we can hear on the little rig. Consequently, we're doing a fair amount of geography every day.

And there's more. Today, for the first time ever, a reverse beacon network station picked up the Rockmite, and that station was in Canada! First off, the Rockmite signal had reached out over 1,000 miles. Second? Looking at the path on the map,

I realized that it was along the grey line at the time of morning the signal was hear. Now, the kids and Iget to talk about grey lines, (the line on the Earth between night and day. We get to talk about radio propagation modes. We also get to talk about GIS software systems.

The little radio has a single transitor output amplifier. We can talk about that when they get to transistors. The code keyer that's buit-in is an embedded microcontroller. There's a whole other branch of study.

This one little thing is giving so much, and it's something Ijust happened to be interestsed in anyway. Will the kids be intersted in all of this? Probably not, but Ialready know they're interested in some of it, and that's enough!

Do you need to be into amateur radio for this kind of network of interests to pop up? Nope. The same thing happens to us with art, (which Iknow from little to nothing about), and other things as well. One thing just leads to another.

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