One of the issues around amateur radio operators is their age. I have a friend who, at 55, was the youngest member of his local ham radio club. It's just not a hobby many people pick up any more.
What's the skill they're doing? Operating a radio? Is the skill voice procedure that's the skill? Or is it maintaining the physical radios? These days any radio I use is basically a full micro-computer, so you can't just jump in there and start soldering like a transistor setup from decades ago.
I suppose setting up and siting some unusual antenna geometries is still a skill.
Another interest group are folks who build their own radios. One very active group are those who build Elecraft radios, which end being up competitive with the most expensive radios out there.
Another very active group are ham radio contesters, that draw hams from all over the world to compete, including events in morse code.
An event that happens every four years is the World Radio Team Championship: https://wrtc.info/ . Again, hams from all over the world converge, the first year was seattle, another giant event was in Boston, another in Finland, and most recently Germany.
A particularly exciting merger of ham radio and computers are the modern digital protocols, particularly FT8 and FT4 that are effective even in low power and compromised antenna situations. This has been created and supported by Joe Taylor, K1JT, a Nobel Laureate.
A very serious technical challenge is communicating by bouncing signals off the moon called EME or moonbounce. This is at the edge of abilities, and only a few amateurs are successful at this.
As far as age is concerned, many clubs today are taking up the challenge of getting young folks interested. Tim Duffy, K3LR, has sponsored an event with very young folks: https://dxnews.com/forum/forum/yota-ycp-scouts/13318-k3lr-wp.... One very active ham is Violetta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or512r7vels
Yeah, or even just knowing how to hack together a random wire end fed antenna...
Some hams are into HF antennas and DX phone or CW contacts, same as always.
Some hams are into WSPR and other QRSS/QRPP modes, getting around the world on milliwatts.
Some hams are launching and working satellites, in all sorts of modes.
Some hams are doing digital TV, especially the lucky ones in the QO-100 footprint who can do TV over wideband amateur satellite transpoder.
Some hams are playing with various internet-connected radios and repeaters, like the old Echolink/IRLP but now there's DMR and Brandmeister and stuff.
Some hams just want to use HTs that don't suck, while off-roading or otherwise in places cellphones might not work.
I could go on. It's a hundred hobbies that have a license in common and sometimes very little else.
Age and gatekeeping is definitely an issue. It would be nice to see more focus on SDRs, GNURadio and things that connect more with a wider crowd.
They went along and tried to engage the local club. They gave up and now refuse to deal with them. He suggested to me that either someone needs to start a digital-only club, or, as recently happened with our overarching national body, someone needs to intervene and take over the club to keep it relevant.
Not too exciting to say the least. How about some photos of people doing interesting things with ham radio? And as you said, there are plenty of those interesting things.
For example, here are some recent talks at PAARA:
- 3D printing for ham radio (coming up this week)
- Amateur radio communications during disasters
- Using piezoelectric material as a radiating element for VLF communications
- Making waves at UCSC: from ham radio to SlugSats (University of California Santa Cruz's CubeSat research on high frequency communications and particle physics)
- From Faraday to Hertz: the birth of wireless
- Designing off-grid solar power systems
- Parachute Mobile (a local group that skydives with ham radio transceivers and makes contacts on the way down. Why? Because they can!)
About the age thing: don't sell the oldsters short. One ham I know is probably in his 80's, and is setting up a system to track down malicious interference using Gforth for realtime analysis of SDR data, and now he's learning Python to build an application around this for volunteers to help track down the jammers.
The spread of activity of FT4 and FT8 is worldwide and extremely active.
I'm 28 now, and it's basically the reason for my career. So to "pay it forward," advocating for youth in ham radio has turned into my (very unpaid) side hustle. The current run of leading amateur radio organizations are aged, and more-or-less self serving the older demographic. I'm not sure if ham radio just was and always will be an old persons hobby, or if younger people can enjoy it too.
Right now I help run a ham radio club for youth (https://yarc.world/), with a 1300-member young hams discord server (https://discordapp.com/invite/E7GY7fR), as well as a youth advocacy organization named Youth on the Air (https://youthontheair.org) that will be running a summer camp for 30 young hams from North and South America at the Voice of America museum in Cincinnati, OH.
For more than half a century, the demographics have always been its a life long hobby most pick up in their middle age, and a steady fifth of a percent of the population are hams.
Because of the baby boomers the number of hams in the USA is larger now than ever.
Note that if contemporary "broadcasting" has taught anything, its even a very small fraction of the population can have a distinct healthy culture AND quite a bit of variety within that culture. So most hams are 60 yr old retiring EE-type men, but there are certainly all kinds of folks and its a very social hobby.
What is "old" is the concept of local clubs for any hobby or activity. Young folks don't do "clubs" of any sort, so naturally all the hams in the local clubs are old. There are also correlated effects where VHF FM repeaters were affordable and high tech for a small (dozen size) club in maybe 1980, and with the decline in that form of operation the average age is quite high. In the 80s it was fairly normal for FM repeater club members to be pretty young as that was the high tech rebellious thing to do.