FOR THE KIDS : Club Lets the Whole Family Ham It Up on the Airwaves : Foursquare Radio Amateur Youth gives children and their parents a place to learn about wireless communication.
While the space shuttle Endeavour circled the Earth one night earlier this month, Jonathan Fleischer, 13, and his buddies at the Foursquare Radio Amateur Youth club huddled around a ham radio, hoping to make contact.
“KB5YSR, this is AC6GS,†Jonathan said repeatedly into a microphone. “Are you out there?â€
The shuttle’s 90-minute orbit put it within radio reach for 12 minutes. Club members took turns at the microphone, tracking the shuttle’s path on a computer screen. The minutes ticked by, but the only response was static.
“We tried, we failed, oh well,†Jonathan said, finally giving up.
Failure isn’t something this Oxnard kid is accustomed to. It took him only eight weeks to master all the technical know-how to get his first ham radio license about 1 1/2 years ago.
Inspired by his father, Wayne Fleischer, who is also a ham (as the operators are known), Jonathan delved into complicated math, Morse code and antenna technology and whizzed through higher-level licenses until he snagged his “extra class†license. In ham radio, that’s as high as it goes for amateurs, and Jonathan is now among the youngest operators in the United States to earn it.
Last October, he and his sister, Jennifer, organized a club for kids at their school, St. John’s Lutheran School in Oxnard. The club has since moved and broadened to become a family club, open to anyone. Membership is up to about 60 parents and children, according to Wayne Fleischer, who helps run the club.
The club meets the first Friday of the month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Oxnard Christian Center, 333 W. 7th St. The cost to join is $25 per family. Usually a speaker talks about ham radio use or history. George Thomas, who helped build flight engines for Rocketdyne, recently spoke about various space missions.
Kids as young as 7 years old belong to the club. (The youngest person there to hold a license is 8.) Some are children of ham radio enthusiasts; some got their parents involved. They learn the technology from adults as well as kids like Jonathan, and they also get together just for fun once a month. The club even has its own historian: 91-year-old Harold Wheeler, who got his amateur radio license in 1917 and went on to pursue a career in wireless engineering.
The club’s hub is a small room that houses a bank of ham radio equipment, enabling members to chat worldwide. On the wall is a map of the world and pictures of space launches and astronauts. A big digital clock blinks nearby.
At the meeting earlier this month, kids could look at a monitor and see a circle around the moving shuttle and a circle around the western United States. When the circles intersected, the shuttle--traveling 17,500 miles per hour about 190 miles up in space--would be within radio reach. Of the seven astronauts on board, six are licensed hams; one of the mission objectives was to make radio contact with people, especially kids.
A simple acknowledgment from the shuttle would have thrilled the group jammed around the radio. Just in case they made contact, Jonathan was ready with a question: How do they take showers?
Jonathan, the club president, has made plenty of contacts in the short time he has been on the waves.
“Japan, England, Germany, Gibraltar, you name it--I’ve talked to them,†said Jonathan, an exuberant, talkative kid. When he’s not tapping out Morse code at 35 to 40 words a minute, he’s chatting on the radio with a teen-ager in Cleveland.
During the flooding in January, Jonathan and his sister worked at the county’s emergency command post at the government center and provided some radio help for the Red Cross.
“They had never used kids before,†Wayne Fleischer said.
Ham radio is much more than chatting on the airwaves, he said. It teaches children math, geography and computer skills. And for families, “It’s good quality time,†he said.
Details
* WHAT: Foursquare Radio Amateur Youth, a ham radio club for kids and parents.
* WHEN: Meetings are on the first Friday of the month, 7 to 9 p.m.
* WHERE: Oxnard Christian Center, 333 W. 7th St., Oxnard.
* HOW MUCH: $25 per family.
* CALL: 486-6226.
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