VHF course pre-study?

lufc71

lufc71

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I've finally managed to book myself and SWMBO on a VHF course. Yippee!!

Aside from the phonetic alphabet which I've given her to swat up on (I'm hoping that that will make up for the birthday present which I didn't get her :)), is there any study required prior to the course? Or can we just pick it up on the day? Over :)
 
little_roundtop said:
Agreed. It's not difficult in any sense of the word. You will need a lot of patience, you'll spend more time listening to your fellow students than you will saying anything yourself.
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It's already been decided by the powers that be that the SRC is too easy. I think they're looking at a 2 day course followed by an independent assessor.
 
st599 said:
It's already been decided by the powers that be that the SRC is too easy. I think they're looking at a 2 day course followed by an independent assessor.
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The LRC is a 4-day course followed by and independent examiner. It is about 2 days too long.
 
As others have said, you really don't need to worry. I'm an old ham radio operator, so operating procedures cam pretty naturally to me, but my wife had never touched a microphone in her life. She had a bad case of flu when we did our course - dragged herself out of bed and was drugged up to the eyeballs all day - struggling to stay awake! She still passed - with a decent score - then passed out! :(
 
lufc71 said:
I've finally managed to book myself and SWMBO on a VHF course. Yippee!!

Aside from the phonetic alphabet which I've given her to swat up on (I'm hoping that that will make up for the birthday present which I didn't get her :)), is there any study required prior to the course? Or can we just pick it up on the day? Over :)
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makes sense to memorise the channel allocation and the pro words. Students nearly always find that the difficult bit is using the simulators so if they have memorised some of the procedure it does help.
 
Tim Lee said:
:D:D

No prep required. The quality of the course depends a lot on your instructor. When I took mine I was pretty disappointed with the content.
Many would probably learn more from a book. I wonder if anyone has ever been hauled up for not having the ticket (in a non-commercial environment)?
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Many thanks for the replies everybody :)

The only reason that I've been trying to arrange this is because I want to complete my CS and it is a requirement prior to the exam (along with 1st aid). As I'll usually be sailing with my OH, it'll be handy that she can use the radio if I fall/get pushed in :)
 
It's a farce.
I took my course just before the MMSI and DSC stuff became mandatory and the lecturer waffled on about the system but couldn't demonstrate it.

Having been trained in Signals, I asked about wireless procedures - and was told that there were none.
From a practical point - how to conduct an exchange of messages, general behaviour and so on it was disappointing.

So many of these schemes set out with high hopes and standards, but in practice fail miserably. Such a pity. With a bit of planning the course could and should have been of value.
 
I did a non DSC course years ago and found it useful and quite well organised.

Recently I did the new course as a) I now had a DSC radio and b) the course at our club was short of numbers and I was offered a cheap rate. :D

Our local RYA instructor is first rate, she is well equipped with demo radios so you can actually use one rather than just pretend, she covered all you need to know including procedure and PRO words. Altogether a very worth while day.
 
Very well worth while reading the RYA booklet G22 mentioned above (Only £6.99). In fact reading that thoroughly is about all you need to do ..
Know that and you dont really need the course esp if you already have some practical experince/ knowledge

the sylabus and exemplar questions is in anothe booklet G26

For a more comprehensive treatment there is of course also the RYA VHF Handbook by our stroppy old friend Tim Bartlett
 
TrueBlue said:
It's a farce.
I took my course just before the MMSI and DSC stuff became mandatory and the lecturer waffled on about the system but couldn't demonstrate it..... With a bit of planning the course could and should have been of value.
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If you did the course "just before the MMSI and DSC stuff became mandatory", then you were presumably doing a course that led up to the old "Restricted VHF only" Certificate, which could be taught by anyone with a VHF licence of their own, without necessarily sticking to any formal syllabus, with no training in how to put a course across, and no minimum equipment requirements. Some were good: some weren't.

I remember some of the establishments I taught it at being quite impressed that I turned up with a couple of (non functioning) radios so that my students could actually fiddle with real knobs and a couple of toy walkie talkies to practice saying "over" at the right time.

The "new" syllabus may have gone a bit far the other way, but at least there is now a clearly-defined syllabus, everyone who teaches and assesses it has had their knowledge and teaching ability assessed, and minimum equipment requirements have evolved from "this fag packet represents your microphone", through computer simulators, to genuine radios adapted to operate as hard-wired simulators.

It doesn't guarantee that you will get the world's best (or most organised) instructor, but you should get one who is competent, equipped, and covers the syllabus.
 
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