[AMRadio] Shelby Fest

[CL in NC]

When I mentioned 'Shelby, NC event coordinator' was not referring to the Shelby club, but to the City of Shelby. events coordinator.  At the time, she for some odd reason was very antagonistic toward the fest and actually drove them away to Dallas, NC.  That venue was actually pretty nice, a lot more trees and a big air conditioned meeting hall.  After that person was fired at the behest of the local merchants that realized they lost a ton of money, they were successful at luring the fest back to Shelby.   But as was commented, all fests are really falling off except for a few of the big ones like Huntsville, Dayton and Orlando.

>From a 'source' of things ARRL I have talked to on the phone at length and in person at Shelby, the membership is still in decline and they can not figure out how to attract the biggest group of license holders, the Technician Class.  According to him, the Tech class has a 'We don't need the League' attitude.  A big part of the decline is related to long time dedicated members going SK.  He said they ran a call out to life members to see how many were still out there, out of the total, found 1500 who were SK's, some as long as 15 years ago.  One widow when asked why she didn't call and let them know, said he wanted to keep receiving QST to put it on the coffee table as it has been there her whole life.  There is serious discussion at the Board level to bring back QST as a quaterly publication, QEX will be rolled into it, and QEX with only 700 subscribers will be no longer printed within a month or two.  They have actively been seeking out how to model and manage their publications after other venues, studying and conferring with groups like the NRA who just recently went to quarterly after reducing their number of mag offerings, AOPA who prints a monthly mag, and Firecrown media who still print many hobby magazines, some still monthly.  Of course, postage has become a real problem too.  'They' (Wall Street bottom liners) shut down the Canton Paper Mill here in WNC, 'they' shut down two of the biggest pulp mills down near Savannah, GA, and all these publications and printers say the same thing, they can't get the paper.  Back in 2022, the printer for the ARRL said the only way they could print the May editions is if the ARRL would find and buy the paper, and pay them an extra $500K bucks, the League had only $700,000 they could have used, so that was the last of QST.  

I thnk the League still needs to make some serious changes and become viable and useful again, but I believe their NE mindset has their critical thinking ability blocked, and maybe a relocation to say, Oklahoma,  the middle of the US, would make their signal have better coverage, and Oklahoma thinking clear up their frozen Connecticut mindset. 

Charlie in NC