Experimentation is about failure ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio

There is an interesting phenomenon that I've begun to notice and now that I've seen it, it's hard to un-see. Think of it as the equivalent of the little dot in the top right corner of the screen that signifies the end of the reel to a movie projectionist. Once you've seen it, you can't miss it ever again. If you haven't, sorry, you will and now you'll carry that with you for the rest of your life.

Across Amateur Radio, from Foundation and Standard through Advanced or Technician and General though Extra, there is this thing where people get together and ask each other how to get started.

It's amazing to observe, grown adults every one of them, not daring to take the first step. It ranges from keying your microphone for the first time, through to making your first HF contact, through building an antenna, going portable, climbing a mountain, making contact with the International Space Station, doing a contest, building a radio or erecting a tower.

It seems that collectively we've forgotten that this whole thing we do is about experimentation. We're so wrapped up in failure that more and more I see people wanting reassurance that what they're doing is right. Like they have to somehow be perfect the first time, be amazing, be accurate, eloquent, sturdy, brilliant or whatever is going on.

I don't know how this started, but it's got to stop. If we extrapolate along this path we're going to end up as licensed automatons with no innovation, no spunk, no mistakes and no learning.

Don't mistake me. You're not alone, there is prior learning to be had and community knowledge to be gleaned, but if you never fall flat on your face, how will you ever learn to get up?

So, next time you're getting ready to do something, just start. Don't wait for validation, take failure in your stride and learn.

Last week a friend and I went to scout a new location for a field day contest. We drove there, set up our station and proceeded to spend the day failing. We got RF into the radio, the computer was barely readable in the sun, I got sunburnt, we made two contacts and had a miserable time with short power leads, hard to use trees and to boot, it was hot.

On the flip side, we trialled a new antenna design, learned that my clip on ferrite chokes don't and that we now had a list of things we'd learned and stuff we needed to bring when we came up for real.

We didn't go up there to fail, we wanted to activate a rare WWFF Park, but instead we failed and learned other stuff.

Think of this whole thing in a different way, frame it not as success or failure, but frame it as a way to learn something. Edison had this to say: "Negative results are just what I want. They're just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don't."

Learning to experiment and being an experimenter and having a license that says you're an experimenter is also about learning to fail. Don't be scared. It happens to all of us. The better you fail, the better you succeed.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB