[AMRadio] W7RT

[Anthony W. DePrato]

At 03:58 AM 1/12/2006 -0600, W5OMR/Geoff wrote:

>If anyone needed to know anymore about W7RT, this should sum it up...
>
>-Geoff/W5OMR
>----------------
yep another old ham like myself who needs to get back on his med's .

I can not understand why these guys think that No Code will bring more 
young people into the hobby. the young people are into computers and 
gaming. not talking. Ham radio has always been made up of those who had the 
sprite born in them. it just takes exposure to the hobby to bring it to the 
surface. I still recall the day i walked into my old Voc. arts class room 
as a 14 yrs old and the teacher K4UNE SK had setup his  R 100 and Globe 
Chief station on a bench and put up a dipole outside. during lunch that day 
he showed us all what ham radios was . it only took 15mins and that spark 
was set . i was in awl  amazed and 45 + years later still am.
doing away with code and giving away the tickets which is about what we are 
doing now will not help. we pushed for tech's to get on 10 MT voice and 2 
MT fm. we had a great influx the big 3 sold lots of gear the ARRL got lots 
of new members . DID they upgrade and move on the HF NO only a handful and 
i would bet that handful were the ones who had that spark lite when they 
were first exposed.
i have been a VE ever since the program started and held theory and code 
class's long before we could give the tests. to date i have over 200 
class's under my belt . and i can say that 95% of those who finished the 
class and took the test went on to upgrade. a few did not they liked 2 MT 
fm and emergency nets. a few never renewed. someone said he was too old to 
learn the code. my youngest was a girl of 7 yrs who passed 13wpm and the 
oldest was a 79 year old man who passed 13 wpm. so that story does not hold 
water. i had a friend who got his no code tech. told me he could not learn 
the code. i worked with him for a week and he had learned all the letters 
and numbers. now i told him just keep it up for a few more weeks. sad to 
say after i did not help him every night "work stopped that " he just quite 
and never tried again. so you have to have the spark that drives you or you 
will never go on.
W7RT had the spark but somewhere along the line his thinking became 
impaired  IMHO.
73 Tony
wa4jqs