Well that was interesting....

During the summer NAQP, my daughter's boyfriend, Tyler, sat and watched me operate and was fascinated.   He has since gotten his Technician license and is currently studying for his General.

I decided to let him operate 10 meters until the band went dead, using his own call from my station.  He made 83 Q's and took to RTTY contesting like a fish to water.  So well, in fact, that I let him operate the rest of the contest with my call, under my supervision.  Within two hours, he was doing SO2R with the rate meter well over 100 at times.  I made some Q's while he had lunch and dinner but he made 99% of the Q's.  In all of my years of breaking in new contesters, I have never seen anything like this 27 year old kid.  

I want to emphasize that this Tyler, K1TLA, made 400 Q's in his first ever contest and his first ever time operating on HF.  Just awesome.  Now, he wants to try a phone contest.

After the contest, we took a look at some of the 3830 scores and he immediately locked onto WK6I's score from W7RN.  "How did he do it?", he asked.  I showed him a picture of Jeff at the controls of W7RN along with Tom's antenna system.  (Note to Jeff: Tyler wants to operate RTTY at Tom's place now).