[GCARC] Watch 11 year old KJ7NLL describe his 10-foot helical antenna to talk to the ISS

[Jon Pearce]

This kid is amazing.  He got his Technician license at 8, his General at 9 and is now using microwave-design software to spec out the 2 meter and 23 cm helical antennas that he’ll rotate with home-build rotators using C code that he wrote himself to track the satellites.  He built a mock-up of the whole system using Lego blocks and did a presentation to the local ham club which he recorded and then edited for his own YouTube channel. His goal is to talk to the ISS, and as someone who as actually done that (yeah, I had to throw that in…) I know that a 10-foot helical isn’t needed – but then we used commercial antennas and tracking software (although we did use a 3D-printed rotator) – but this kid has built EVERYTHING himself. He even has a video of how he used his mon’s toaster oven to make a printed circuit board.

Go watch the presentation that he did for his local ham club and see how poised and knowledgeable he is. One attendee asked when he was going to apply to MIT, to which he replied that he’s only 11 so it may be too soon.

There are three linked articles with a lot of embedded videos so be sure to catch everything. Pretty amazing kid!

    https://www.eejournal.com/article/o-m-gosh-ive-been-zeked-part-1/

73 de Jon WB2MNF