The Uncertain Future of Ham Radio
As a guy in his 30s who got his ham license last year, there are two major things I think the ham radio community needs to change if they want to increase membership. Firstly, they need to target the right demographic for recruitment. Right now they&#x27;re laser-focused on targeting teens, since that&#x27;s the age many of these older guys originally got into the hobby, however (as the article acknowledges) what draws people to amateur radio today is very different to what drew people back then. I think the demographic they need to be targeting is engineers and scientists of all types and electronics hobbyists in their 20s-40s, i.e. people who have an aptitude&#x2F;knowedge base to build off and who can imagine applications for radio, and who have the income and physical space to invest in the hobby. (Don&#x27;t get me wrong, if younger people want to get involved they absolutely should be encouraged to do so, but I don&#x27;t think there is enough interest there to rebuild the base the hobby needs to continue.)<p>Secondly, the ham community needs a <i>much</i> better presence on the web. ARRL&#x27;s site has a lot of information but if you don&#x27;t know what you are looking for it can be a bit of a maze to navigate. Also, they <i>really</i> want to sell you their books, which means some of that vital information about being an amateur radio operator is not available for free on their site.<p>The web presence of local clubs is highly variable but often poor. For example, the club I took my license exam through has two different web sites with different information in them, one of which is apparently no longer maintained and the other of which is &quot;temporary&quot;. I got a free 1-year membership to the club when I passed my exam so I get a ~monthly newsletter from them, but it&#x27;s sent from a personal e-mail account in the form of a PDF attachment. I actually deleted those newsletters for the first few months because I didn&#x27;t know who was sending them or why I was getting them!<p>The club doesn&#x27;t have any social media presence and meetings were strictly in-person before the Coronavirus. Because I live a 45-minute (in good traffic) drive away from where they hold meetings I hadn&#x27;t attended any before they held those online ones.<p>Clubs really need to invest in their online presence as that&#x27;s where people under the age of 50 will first encounter them. They should have a decent-looking site with a dedicated domain, photos&#x2F;blog posts about activities they do and, if possible, <i>recordings of their meetings</i> so people can see what joining the club brings them. They should also maintain a presence on Facebook and Twitter, if only to post the occasional updates and links to their main site.<p>Online forums aren&#x27;t much better. QRZ Forums, the largest English-language online amateur radio community, has such a reputation for being hostile to newcomers to the hobby that I haven&#x27;t even bothered  looking at it. r&#x2F;amateurradio, by nature of being on Reddit, has a much younger and more welcoming demographic than QRZ Forums, but it has the problem of being on Reddit which is not conducive to any kind of long-running discussions which makes forming a community hard.<p>On YouTube channels that focus on amateur radio rarely seem to cover topics related to getting people interested in the hobby or the basics of the hobby, and those that do generally seem tsrgetted at the &quot;prepper&quot; community (which is not me). What got me to take the time to get my license was a guy on a programming forum I follow posting that he was going to do live streams of himself making contacts and otherwise doing projects related to radio. Just seeing the practical side of the hobby was enough to push me from a vague interest to getting my license. Unfortunately he stopped streaming after a few months, but this is <i>exactly</i> the type of content organizations like ARRL or local clubs should be putting out to get people interested.