A friend of mine sent me this link and I looked at it with mixed emotions. This YL in the span of 8 days acquired three ham licenses: Tech, General and Extra. She already has snagged a vanity call sign and can't await to have her 1st POTA experience. She has been loaned some top end radios to do the POTA event, and she is off and running. Also amazing is the 4K followers and 23K views in just one day. There is no question she is a Ham Radio Rock Star!
First, I should say kudos for pursuing a ham ticket, lord knows we need to fill the well. But in some ways, I feel that she is missing out on the basic fundamentals of the hobby.
Ham Radio is extremely technology based and its current status with some pretty sophisticated toys came from hams who pushed the envelope. Her route seems to have skipped completely over the technical side and in short order simply thrust her into being a user/appliance operator running POTA strings.
Now I may be completely off base, but I would ask her can you explain how a SSB Transceiver works and could you build one? Extra Class hams of old could do those two tasks and the on the air signals emanating from their stations were better for that because they knew how it should work and sound.
But if you want to sell expensive radios you eliminate all requirements that formerly existed and now all you need is a big bag of money or headroom on the credit card. In her case she managed to wrangle some pretty nice gear for a POTA operation without spending any of her own money. Good show YL... you will go far in this hobby.
However, at this rate the YL will never get the thrill of telling the other station: The rig on this end is homebrew. This is how our hobby started!
We cannot fault this YL as she simply used a process engineered by the ARRL who awarded her a ham ticket with the sole purpose to sell more radios for their foreign advertiser support base. Clever YL she didn't buy an expensive radio hawked by the foreign radio interests on the web pages of QST.
Them that know are just a bunch of OTs who realize that achieving an Extra Class License was based on experience, knowledge, skill and chops and took more that 8 days. That original concept has been totally watered down thanks to efforts of that arcane organization in Connecticut.
I would also like to give a special shout out to Speaker Johnson who is responsible for my seeing a huge spike in my cost for healthcare insurance. Thanks, Mike, and many of us will remember you and your party come the Mid-Term elections. I am wondering if those in Speaker Johnson's party who get dumped in the mid-terms, if they have any skills other than screwing over hard-working Americans. A day of reckoning is soon at hand.
73's
Pete N6QW