[Elecraft] Reaching across the chronological divide

[Bill Frantz]

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, w0mu at 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.
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