My son has a general license. He uses it mostly as part of his
search and rescue team. Really he doesn't have time to play
radio with a high-tension job, a wife, and a 6 year old.
Our club has some interesting new members:
Two women in their early 40s, newly licensed at the extra
level. They ran
our digital operation at field day all night. We might see
more of them,
but they are trying to get a high-tech startup off the ground.
A father/daughter combo. The daughter is barely a teenager if
at all but
has a license. So does the father.
I see a lot of older people getting licenses as part of their
interest in community service.
The take home observation is that people today don't have much
free time. There is tremendous contention for what free time
there is. Getting on the air needs to pop to the top of the list
before we have a new, active ham.
Any radio designed to attract new people to ham radio should
recognize that getting a higher level license is a challange
which will only be met by someone already motivated. The tech
level license doesn't help attract people to what most of us
consider ham radio -- HF. Learning CW requires a lot of
motivation, and the only non-CW available in HF is 10M SSB --
Not the best band a the bottom of a sunspot cycle.
Some of the ARRL suggestions for opening some HF to tech digital
operation would go a long way toward solving these problems. But
in the current environment, to come out with a radio that
supports 10M but only does FM, is something only a company not
thinking about the US licensing structure could do. (And yes, I
have a specific radio company in mind.)
As a side note, I became interested in operating, as compared
with building equipment, because I discovered that PSK31 was a
lot like the computer chat systems I had used. They were already
comfortable, so the only barriers were the radio problems, which
I had a good background in solving. (I have since branched out
into CW and voice, but digital is still my home territory.)
73 Bill AE6JV, who hasn't been on the air since moving into a
retirement home.
On 12/14/19 at 11:12 AM, w...@w0mu.com (W0MU Mike Fatchett) wrote:
I am not sure how you sell Ham Radio to people today. I have
two sons and a daughter. One son got licensed really young
and did some contests and mobile activities with me but never
got hooked like I did. People have less free time than ever
and there are more options for entertainment than ever.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz | Concurrency is hard. 12 out | Periwinkle
(408)356-8506 | 10 programmers get it wrong. | 16345
Englewood Ave
www.pwpconsult.com | - Jeff Frantz | Los Gatos,
CA 95032
______________________________________________________________
Elecraft mailing list
Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft
Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net
This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
