Our Antenna Workshop

An opportunity to practice what we preach

We’re now between Basic courses and we constantly tune-up our methods, learning from feedback. Like other licensing courses, we cover the Introduction to Amateur Radio, Ohms Law, basic components, propagation, transmission lines, antennas and block diagrams of receivers and transmitters. The big section toward the end is Rules and regulations. It’s big because it typically counts for 25 to 30% of the exam questions and we leave it so students have enough material to relate those rules to the technical part of the course. 

On a Saturday after the transmission lines and antennas have been covered, around Week 4, we host the class at an antenna building workshop. It is one of those sessions that is hands-on and sets aside our course from the many others that are offered. In this session the students build a dual band roll-up J-pole antenna that they cut, solder and tune, then take home as their first antenna. It is a fun session and brings home many of the points that are discussed in the classroom sessions and offers many their first exposure to solder smoke.

All course attendees receive a complimentary membership to SARC for the current year, and hopefully we will end up with some new permanent members and hams who will embrace our hobby.

Re-instated in the course is an extra week. We have been teaching for 7 weeks with the exam on the 8th. We will now add a week after the formal teaching but before the exam. That will give the students an extra week to study and allow us to add a week to include the 'how to get started' session that we trialed at our January 2020 general meeting. It was a success, see https://ve7sar.blogspot.com/2020/01/get-on-air.html