If they're shooting at you - you know you're doing something right!

Foundations of Amateur Radio There's a quote from a television show that speaks greatly to me. "If they're shooting at you - you know you're doing something right!" I've been producing this weekly recording since May of 2011. It started life as "What use is an F-call?" and the first episode was recorded in response to an Amateur who bemoaned their transmitter power restrictions associated with their beginners license - when I used the same power to speak to a station 15,000km away the week before. I named the segment after the common term for my license - a Foundation License - in Australia known as an F-call. It's the so-called beginner's license, something you can get by spending a weekend with a book and passing a test that introduces you to the hobby of Amateur Radio. Since that first recording I've produced 296 different episodes, it was renamed to "Foundations of Amateur Radio" and I started putting the recording online as a podcast. In those episodes I've covered many different topics, from what to spend your money on, how to get started, what antenna's do and how you can build them, how different technologies work and what the Amateur Radio community is like. A recurring theme in my recordings is the attitude of other Amateurs to those who are starting in the hobby. I come back to it regularly because I keep getting emails from listeners who are subjected to varying levels of abuse by other Amateurs. I've taken to going to the Amateur Training College to explain that Amateurs are a mixed lot, many wonderful people and some rotten apples who make a lot of noise. I have had messages detailing abhorrent behaviour and read messages of those who left the hobby because of it. Fortunately the opposite is also true. I have messages from people who came back to this amazing adventure and got inspired by some of the things I've said and used this to rekindle their interest, or to finally go for their license, or to finally pluck up the courage and press the Push To Talk button on their radio and speak. We all make mistakes. I know I do. Sometimes I even find out that I made a mistake. For example, last week an Amateur told me that I'd claimed to have had 45 years of Computing Experience, which would make me a toddler when I started. Turns out he's right, I did claim that. Whoops. I meant to say 35 years, but wait for a bit and 45 years will be close enough. It's a shame that he didn't comment on the actual content of the segment, namely that we have a pre-conceived idea of what constitutes an Amateur, even though that is a changing thing. The episode is called "We should stop requiring electronics to be amateurs.", episode 28 of Foundations of Amateur Radio if you're interested. It's also a shame that he didn't point out a much larger error, in my episodes about chickens, but another Amateur, who sat on this for some time because he wasn't sure, caught up with me for lunch and we discussed in great detail what our common understanding was. We're still working out how exactly I explain what I said and how it differs from reality, suffice to say, I'm a curious kind-of-guy and I like to learn. That learning is also a regular topic of attack. It seems that some Amateurs who in the words of a wise-man - "who's only achievement in life was to pass their Amateur License" use my continued status as holder of a Foundation License as evidence that I'm clearly not able to pass my exam and ridicule my excuse of a License to claim that I want to talk to the world using 5 Watts before changing license. I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is your hobby. If you gain pleasure from getting a higher level of responsibility, then by all means do so. If you need something that your current license doesn't have, go for it. For me, my license does exactly what I want today, nothing more, nothing less. I have enough privileges to achieve what I want from this hobby today and my lowly license did not prevent me from spending every week learning something new about this hobby. As this recording gains in popularity I'm expecting more and more people to take pot-shots at me. As I started, "If they're shooting at you - you know you're doing something right!" - taking pot-shots as keyboard warriors is pretty easy to do. Seems that it's much harder to actually engage in a meaningful conversation about the topic at hand. You might be listening to this and wondering why I'm bringing this up. Simple really. You are an Amateur, you're likely to be interacting with other Amateurs. Some of those will be helpful and friendly and others will be the opposite. I'm talking about this to make sure that you don't loose track of why you became an Amateur and to keep enjoying this wonderful hobby. I love this hobby. It challenges me every week and it gives me a thrill every time I learn something new. I hope that I'm not alone in that. I'm Onno VK6FLAB