Child Ham in QST

Was pleasantly surprised to see a young local ham depicted in the December 2016 edition of QST magazine on page 84 documenting Field Day results:

Mary Steelman KG5EXJ is a local girl whose parents are also hams.  The family is active in ARES and a local club.

I was privileged to be one of the Volunteer Examiners (VE) who signed her certificate when she passed her Technician license exam in November 2014 at the tender age of 7!

Her mother (also Mary but goes by Angie) upgraded from Tech to General at the same exam session.

It is so cute to hear young Mary’s little voice on the air.  She is now an Extra Class operator!!!  (to match both parents)

Swimming in a Sea of Hams

I live in area where there are many hams.  Not sure why, really, but we have a lot of licensed radio amateurs here.

There are more than 52K hams in Texas alone, second only to California (from ARRL FCC license counts):

I’m located in grid square EM10 (roughly 100mi wide by 70 high [7000 sq mi]), covering much of central Texas:

Looking at ham density in the state of Texas we see two large clusters in the Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown area which includes Cedar Park and Leander as well:

Looking at the Austin area shows 3588 hams in 99 ZIP codes:

Williamson county (mine) licensed ham count is 1729, Travis county (adjacent south) has 2951.

Just in Cedar Park (pop.~72K) we have 291 licensed hams: