The AM Forum

The Local Scout Master here in the 3 land of Washington Pa. has asked for some help with the boys in my sons troop regarding Amateur Radio.. I asked him what he wanted to do...there is so much...well he understands Phone with no problem but he was a little sticky on the CW issue....So, i have come up with an idea that may be of some help to ease this problem. I have found an Info Tech 300c Keyboard that is in FB shape that may do the job quite nicely...Found on the Epay place...I will mate this with the 897D and an HP laptop with CW Get running...maybe this might work to Ease the nervousness a bit...

any thoughts, best i could do on short notice and very little HF equipment.

Dont put your foot in your mouth!! ;D ;D

Since my son is about to finish his Eagle project and I'm the webmaster for his troop's website, so I have some slight expertise in this area...

I'll be the first to ask: should CW be part of getting kids involved with Ham radio? Not to put too fine a point to it, but what "sells" a merit badge to the scouts is the "Wow!" factor that they can take home and tell their parents about. There's not a lot of "Wow!" in CW anymore, you know?

I suggest that you consider something more in tune (no pun intended) with the kids' everyday experiences, such as packet radio connections between computers, or more exciting, such as Echolink connections to one of the bases in Antarctica: I've used both at Scout demonstrations, with excellent results.

HTH.

73, Bill W1AC

I never made it from 2nd class scout to first class.  I passed all the requirements except for knowing the Morse Code.   Eventually I got my general class ham license at age 13 and became an assistant scoutmaster when my kids were in the scouts.   I never could interest any of the scouts in my sons' troop in ham radio or anything technical.

In 2000 one of the local troops sponsored our New Hampshire council spring Jamboree and called it Impossible Mission 2000. They had many different events for the kids each patrol competing on each of the "spy oriented" events. Several were at night. One involved sending a coded morse message across a field using a flashlight. This was an opportunity to introduce the scouts to the code. I was an assistant scoutmaster at the time and my oldest son Shane was a couple years into Boy Scouts. We made copies of the code on small sheets and handed them out about three weeks before the event.

What I did not expect was that 5 of the kids had easily memorized the code and they did not use the cheat sheets at all during the event.   

Mike WU2D

Well the thing is the Scout master here does have an interest in telegraphy..He does that Revolutionary war remake stuff. and likes telegraph Big time and is always wanting me to do the remake of telegraphy with them..anyways my thoughts was to display what is happening while sending code, of course i could just set up a laptop and let it do all the work but, my thinking was to keep things separate piece wise at low cost what i could afford off ebay rather cheep...and let them experiment...Hopefully....of course I'll have my key there and associated information.

I do appreciate all the input..thank you...