Hi Andy & Everyone, I haven't posted here much, but this topic is a very common one, getting younger people into other hobbies. As a side note, I promote Ham Radio as much as I can with my customers when they ask what else I do. Most people never heard of it, or at the most, very little. And no one has ever followed up on the hobby.
Case in point: Some of you may know I work in the IT field as an independent technician. I was approached by a South County model airplane flying club to do a simple website and online forum. When asked why, they stated to get some younger members in it, as the youngest one now is 58 or so. We had a long discussion on it, and we decided as there was a guy up north here living closer that had some HTML experience, I would only assist him on the Website, but I would have to do the forum. So we went ahead with it. Two weeks later, there are maybe 5 members in the forum, and the President isn't even signed up. So how does this relate to Ham Radio ? Now we all know that clubs from larger cities will have more members because there are more prospects. So when I promote Ham Radio all I hear the kids say is "I can do that with Instant Messenger". I was told that when youger kids are approached about flying model airplanes, they say they can do it on their computer and don't even have to worry about it breaking if it crashes. Simply put, us old timers, no matter what our hobby, has in most cases, not all, been replaced by a computer or cell phone. Kids are just different than when we were growing up. I see and hear the above scenario almost daily and doubt it is going to change. Still promoting Ham Radio, Curt KA2SLC --- In [email protected], "Andrew J. O'Brien" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I was sitting at my PC tonight and an 11 year old ham just popped in > via Echolink. He and his Dad are newly licensed and I was the 11 > years old's first Echolink contact. In our "QSO" I was encouraged > that he has started CW already but I did feel sorry for him when he > lamented that he can't find kids his age to talk to. He said that he > has talked to friends at school about it , no one is interested. Sad. > K3UK DX Cluster via telnet://cluster.dnyalias.org Other K3UK-CARC Groups DIGITALRADIO Group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/ MixW Group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/themixwgroup/ Unsubscribe this group via [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/carcomm/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
