Online distance learning

Southgate News has details of an online training course leading to the full UK licence organised by the Bath club.

See http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2021/january/online-distance-learning-course-for-full-exam.htm#.YBmj_fGTLrc

On-line CW training at LCWO

Typical LWCO log-on page

If you are like me then your CW skills are not the world's best. Even though I am a G3 and licensed since 1967 my CW really is pretty pathetic. On an HF QSO when exchanging callsigns, reports, and serial numbers I'm usually OK, but when ragchewing with seriously good CW operators I'm embarrassed by the amount I miss. Some operators are very good and slow down, but not everyone.

However, for we CW duffers, help is at hand: http://lcwo.net/ is a rather superb on-line CW training facility that I believe could really help improve CW skills with a few minutes' effort each night. I have been to the site before and managed to improve my speed a bit but need to return there and try some more. All sorts of CW training is available at all sorts of speeds. If you want to use CW, which is an excellent mode especially for QRP, then this is worth a visit.

RF skill levels

In my professional life I interviewed many graduates aspiring to become RF engineers. Very few, in recent years, had what I would call "the knowledge". By this I mean a "gut instinct" for RF that does not come from an academic course, important though this aspect is.  Rather, this "jizz" comes by living and breathing RF through building RF things yourself, however simple. A great many 2:1 graduates in communications electronics knew almost nothing about RF, had never touched a soldering iron ever and were rejected. In all honesty I believe I could sense who would make a good RF engineer within 2 minutes of the interviews starting.

Today I received a request from a Spanish amateur who professed (more or less), "I`ve a problem. I know nothing about electronics and would be unable to build the SAQ converter on your website." He then offered to pay me to build and ship the converter to him. Surely, a radio amateur in ANY country should have learnt basic RF skills as part of his training in preparation for his licence? At the most basic level the understanding may not be deep, but how can a radio amateur really not know how to put together a basic circuit?

In the UK we have a growing, and very serious, issue with poorly educated science and engineering graduates who are simply not coming out of universities with the skills needed to start work in industry. One answer was the sandwich course in which young A-level students were accepted on a company training scheme that married "on the job" skills training with educational training, usually to HND or degree level. People spotted young, with real RF "jizz" (easily judged in interviews) usually went on to become the best engineers we had.