I learned a lot



I was so keen in amateur radio that I did not study hard except for English

in my junior high school days.I operated the station everyday and I seldom studied.

On Sundays I got up early and the first thing I did was to turn on my ham radio

equipment.I watched and got hold of the condition on 21MHz.After that

I had breakfast and without doing other things I went into my room and

started to watch 21 MHz carefully.It was good time on Sunday morning

to find DX stations because it was Saturday night or Sunday morning

around the world and many people were off the work.I tried to have

contact with stations and called many times with my barefoot rig and GP antenna.

It was very hard to get reply with my poor system.When I got reply I spoke about

signal report and my QTH and name.Other than that I tried to tell about weather

in my town and equipment I used.Many Japanese stations seemed to have

a lot of QSOs and I found what they called rubberstamped QSO was fad.

I mean that only exchanging signal report and say good bye in a QSO.

I felt rubberstamped QSO was not interesting.I wanted to talk about

many things like weather, ham radio rigs and antennas and so on.

I was a junior high school student so I did not know many expressions to tell

what I wanted to say.But I wanted to communicate with ham radio friends

all over the world. With a few words and phrases I did what I could do

to explain myself, my town and Japan.Listening to week signals from overseas

was a good way for me to improve my listening comprehension.

Because in many cases week signals had phading in and out (QSB).

I needed to imagine what the stations were saying according with context in QSO.

Thanks to ham radio operation my listening comprehension got better and better.

I even was able to understand very week single side band signals with signal

strength 1.I learned manners too.Generally all ham radio operators were polite.

Many people were very nice to me and I thought I would be nice to people

like other people did to me.It is my philosophy that nice to be nice.

I am happy to have a great hobby like amateur radio.





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