#79 - Radiogram Delivery Issues & Solutions
I have received several Radiograms for ham radio operators that I have not been able to contact to deliver the messages to. Either they do not return my phone calls, or the phone number listed on the Radiogram has been disconnected.
Normally, traffic stations will just give up and send a service message back to the originating station saying that the message was undeliverable. I do not like giving up that easily so I have added a few additional steps that I will be adding in my attempts to deliver the messages.
First I designed the Post Card shown below, that can quickly be filled out and dropped into the mail with a message asking the addressee of the message to contact me.
Since I like to deliver Radiograms in person, I also ordered matching business cards with all of my contact information on it so that if they need to send a Radiogram to anyone, they can easily reach me and I can get it entered into the RRI system for them.
I have also gotten permission from the Net Manager of the Emergency Amateur Radio Club to start listing the message traffic on the EARC Nightly Net on Saturdays. We will try it for a few weeks and see how it goes, but he thought that it was a good idea. This will give me an additional possibility of reaching the hams that I have message traffic for, and it will also get newer hams used to the idea that the service exists.
It suprises me when I deliver a Radiogram to a new ham, and they make a comment that they have never heard of a Radiogram before or knew about the service even though the Radiogram and National Traffic Service is a part of what they studied to get their amateur radio operator licenses and their license exam had at least one question about the Radiogram, NTS, and how the whole message traffic handling system works.
As a mentor to new hams, also known as an Elmer, it is our responsibility to teach new hams about all the various aspects of amateur radio and help them get off to a great start in their adventure into ham radio.
By adding the Message Traffic listing to the EARC Net on Saturday evenings, hopefully that will be one way of introducing the new hams to the workd of message traffic handling and Radiograms, and hopefully it will allow me to get some of these undeliverable Radiograms delivered.
Until Next Time
Aloha & 73 from Hawaii
