Introduction

My name is Ben, call sign KD7UIY. I have had my amateur radio license for 10 years, at the technician level, but haven't used it much for the last 6 years. I got it because I was involved with the building of a student satellite at the University of Arizona. The only terrestrial contacts that I made during that time were with people involved with the program, although I did make a fair number of satellite contacts, via which satellites escapes me now.



A few weeks ago, my license came up for renewal. When I went to renew it, I decided it was time to finally buy my own radio. While I was at it, I thought I'd study for and if possible, take, the General and Amateur Extra exams. Well, I have accomplished both, I am now a newly minted Amateur Extra, and new to the terrestrial Ham Radio in general. I've become interested enough that I wanted to talk about what it is that I am doing.

What I hope to accomplish with this blog is 3 things:

1. Discuss my adventures to becoming an operator, and not just having a license.
2. Set up a plan for teaching kids about Amateur Radio. My focus will be two of my kids (13 year old son and 11 year old daughter), as well as a scout group.
3. Talk about plans, attempts, etc, to make antennas and other things that are useful for a ham.

I'm planning now on doing twice weekly posts to this blog at a minimum, and go from there.

Note that some of these posts might go live a few days after I wrote them. My plan is to get enough of a back log to make sure that I can meet my goal of 2 per week, so that involves a bit of future thinking...