BENGALURU: Students of government schools under the Social Welfare Department are now establishing contact and holding conversations with people from other states and countries through ham radio.
For the first time, Indian Institute of Ham Radio Stations and Social Welfare Department (SWD) have set up ham radio stations in 20 residential schools and have trained 100 students and teachers.
“There are over 800 residential schools in the state run by SWD. For the pilot study, we trained 300 candidates from 20 schools in 2024. The entire project of identifying and setting up ham radio stations started in 2023. The trained students and teachers then wrote the exams organised by Ministry of Communication, to get licence to set up the station.
A total of 100 candidates cleared the exam, of which 37 are teachers. On January 6, we completed the exercise of setting up radio stations in these 20 schools. They are now establishing communication with other ham radio users,” said S Sathyapal, Vice-Chairman and Director, Indian Institute of Hams.
The aim of the project is to create awareness about ham radio and help students get global exposure in the field of science, engineering, art and culture, and communication. Here, the students not just talk to ham radio users nationally and internationally, but also redesign and create their own radios and even work on new frequencies. From each school, one boy and one girl have been selected, from Classes 8-12.
Sathyapal said that at present, radio stations have been set up and each one has a particular ID and frequency for communication. They have started with basic first-level communication, which includes sharing operation link, checking signal strength, audio quality and sharing technical report. Gradually, many tasks will be given to them, including competitions like number of stations that contact was established with or number of people spoken to.
According to statistics, Bengaluru is an amateur ham radio hub with 2,000 active users. Karnataka has a total of 3,000 amateur ham radio users.
“Ham radio communication is gradually picking up, not just in Bengaluru, but globally, and this is an interesting form of communication. We want students to get exposure and even develop this as a hobby,” said an SWD official.