Want to spread the word about your Amateur Radio activities? Visit this week's Surfin' site to see how one kid did it.

The Ham Radio for Kids Web site was built by a ham, who is a kid, for other hams, who are also kids. Andrew Kelly, K3ASK, a 13-year-old with a General class license, is the brains behind Ham Radio for Kids.

Bob Rose, AA3RR, who helped Andrew get his license, says, "Andrew is a self-taught Web site designer and developer. His enthusiasm for the hobby and the obvious pleasure he derives from it are quite apparent throughout his Web site."

The Web site is only a few weeks old, so it is still a work in progress, but I believe that it serves as an inspiration for all hams who ever considered building a Web site to spread the word about Amateur Radio.

The Ham Radio for Kids Web site is an inspiration for wannabe ham radio Webmasters.

If you are doing something cool in Amateur Radio, you can write a story about what you are doing and try and get it published somewhere. The problem is that getting a story published in the Amateur Radio print media is difficult. In these tough economic times, advertising is down everywhere, including in the Amateur Radio publishing world. As a result, space for editorial content is limited and trying to get your story into QST, CQ, 73, etc., may be impossible.

You probably can get your story published in an Amateur Radio club newsletter, but the distribution of the newsletter is usually limited to members of the club, unless the club has the foresight to also publish their newsletter on-line so that it is accessible to the general Internet public.

The Internet is accessible to vastly more people than the total circulation of all the ham radio publications combined. But why depend on a middleman, ie, the on-line club newsletter? Build your own Web site and publish your cool ideas yourself!

Your ISP likely provides some free space for building a site and there are plenty of other services (non-ISPs) that provide free space for building sites. There is even one devoted to ham radio sites only: K3TKJ's QSL.NET. So site space is not an issue.

Building a site is not an issue either. Some of the services that provide free site space like, for example, Yahoo! GeoCities, also provide easy-to-use on-line tools for building a site. Many current word processors will even save a document to HTML format, too, all set for uploading to your Web space.

So, there are no excuses for disseminating your ham radio coolness via the Internet. Start today, build your site and when you are done, send me your URL.

Until next time, keep on surfin'.

Editor's note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, resides in downtown Wolcott, Connecticut, and has been a QST writer for over 25 years. Since getting his ticket in 1969, Stan has sampled nearly every entrée in the Amateur Radio menu (including a stint as Connecticut Section Manager), but he keeps coming back to his favorite preoccupations: VHF and packet radio. As a result, he runs a 2-meter APRS digipeater and weather station (WA1LOU-15) from his mountaintop location in central Connecticut. Stan, a long time advocate of using computers with Amateur Radio, wrote programs to dupe contests and calculate antenna bearings way back in 1978. Today, he is on the board of directors of Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) and uses his Mac to surf the Internet searching for that perfect ham radio Web page. To contact Stan, send e-mail to wa1lou@arrl.net.

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