My wife and I have been enthusiastic users of the radio communications in one form or another for around 30 years and my five children have grown up with radios in the house, in the car and carried portable at every opportunity. When we went on holiday often it was with other radio amateurs and our caravan was never fully set up until all the masts were in place. When we were camping it was quite common when Helen (GW7AAU) and her late friend Eileen (GW1ILZ) went shopping for a call from the shopping aisles of Co-Op or Tescos to come through on 70cms asking if we wanted "Smelly feet cheese or plain cheddar" or if we wanted stripes in our toothpaste. Radio has been part of everyday life for us and although mobile telephones have replaced the brick sizes radios in pockets and handbags it still is. Some people get strange about it but we have lived a lot of our life in full view of local radio amateurs and shortwave listeners.
In a similar fashion computers have been around since my first born arrived on this planet. We started with Vic20s and Commodore64s before graduating to Amigas and finally giving in and buying PCs. After the first computer there was never only one and packet radio ensured I had one C64 with 4 floppy drives when most people still only had cassette tape drives, one to control the rotator, one to log, and three for word processing, photo manipulation and games. It cascaded from there with the whole house wired for a network. The kids friends would come over a LAN party and we all would play Quake or something similar.
All my children have grown up computer savvy and the eldest now has a degree in computer science and works as a web developer. The second eldest is a graphic designer and works with computers. They always had the edge over their schoolmates when it came to IT and computer games, but these things were what their friends were interested in too.
Radio was different none of them ever showed an interest in becoming an amateur and it was a bit disappointing. Then I mentioned that Mold & District ARC was running a course and my eldest daughter and second eldest son have expressed an interest in doing the novice course. That makes me feel so much better, I was beginning to wonder if I had not set the right example to my kids if they did not want to follow my wife and I.
Mold and District Amateur Radio Club meet at 8pm on Wednesday night in Mold Rugby Club. We have our own shack and workshop on site and are looking for Intermediate exam candidates at the moment, but will run Novice and Full licence courses as the need arises.
A good story. Those who think we have to turn ham radio into an emergency service in order to justify its existence should look at the quantifiable benefit of having radio spectrum set aside for personal experimentation in order to excite and motivate our future engineers.
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