{"id":25656,"date":"2020-08-26T16:42:07","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T15:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/?p=25656"},"modified":"2020-11-27T16:22:30","modified_gmt":"2020-11-27T16:22:30","slug":"simon-hodgkiss-m7slh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/blog\/g0ta2c-licensee-stories\/2020\/08\/26\/simon-hodgkiss-m7slh\/","title":{"rendered":"Simon Hodgkiss, 2E0SHO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Why did you start being interested in amateur radio?<\/strong><\/p>\n

From the age of about ten I have been fascinated listening to people being able to talk to each other. I remember building a pretend radio out of some broken parts to attach to my bike and I thought it was just the best thing ever. Moving on to the eighties and my teenage years I was very involved in CB – this was the mobile phone of our generation and back then you needed a radio licence to operate them so my dad said that if I saved up my pocket money and paid for the licence he would buy me a rig, power supply and antenna. We would all pile home from school and jump straight on air where we would spend the night chatting and doing homework. As I grew up and the CB users started to die out, life took over a bit and I listened with a scanner whenever I got the chance always wanting to be able to join in but never quite getting the chance to commit to the training.<\/p>\n

How did you study for the exam? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The recent lockdown and furlough has meant that I, like a lot of others, have suddenly found I have a lot of time on my side and wanted to put it to good use. I found the Essex Ham course via a web search, started\u00a0a course at the end of April with an exam slot booked for the end of June. One of the recommendations was the RSGB Foundation\u00a0Licence training manual so I bought that from the website to accompany the course. Studying was really easy and the course was really well put together. After passing my Foundation exam I went on to train for the Intermediate licence and passed that exam in November.<\/p>\n

What was it like doing the remote invigilation exam?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The thought of the remote exam was much worse than the reality. As an Electrical Engineer I am no stranger to exams as part of life but this one seemed to be a lot more worrying. I think because I need to pass work exams whereas this\u00a0amateur radio exam I really wanted<\/strong> to pass. I thought the remote invigilation would be more intense and like a ‘Big brother’ scenario but nothing could be further from the truth. Lawrence contacted me a few days before the due date for a Skype\u00a0call to make sure that I had all of the software installed and run me through a few things to note for the day. He could\u00a0not have been nicer and took a great deal of time to just talk and get to know me before moving on to explaining the process and what I needed to do to prepare. On the day of the exam it felt like chatting with a friend but, once I had started the RSGB’s exam, Lawrence disappeared\u00a0from view and I became totally immersed\u00a0in the exam itself. I loved how easy the exam questions and pages were to move through, flag an answer to return to and generally work with.<\/p>\n

Which part of amateur radio do you like most at the moment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My life revolves around running and in particular long-distance Ultra Marathon running so I wanted a radio that I could take with me out into the mountains. I bought myself a Yaesu VX-6 submersible\u00a0hand held and have programmed it into a lot of the local HubNet repeaters near to where I run. This is a fantastic system and I love the fact you can make contact all around the world, standing up on the top of a mountain talking to someone in Australia is brilliant. Due to the ‘restrictions’ of the radio I have stuck with 2m \/ 70cm at the moment but have found more than enough to keep me entertained.<\/p>\n

What would you like to try next?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My immediate wishes are nice and simple. I have signed up to the SOTA site and would like to try getting multiple contacts from some of the wild places I find myself in whilst experimenting with different types of antenna and gaining as much experience\u00a0as possible. Moving forward I would like to work towards becoming a Full licence holder.<\/p>\n

From what I have seem so far, the\u00a0Society does a really great job and I have found everyone I have dealt with to be incredibly\u00a0supportive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why did you start being interested in amateur radio? From the age of about ten I have been fascinated listening to people being able to talk to each other. I remember building a pretend radio out of some broken parts to attach to my bike and I thought it was just the best thing ever. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20358,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[382],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-g0ta2c-licensee-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20358"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}