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Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

Enrollment is up but it's not clear how many actually engage with local clubs.

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.

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Plenty of young people are involved in "maker" and "hacker" activities using radio communications on the unlicensed bands. The cost of entry is on the order of $10 compared to $1000 for a half-decent HF station that's less versatile and less interesting. That's where amateur radio needs to provide value to stay relevant, not drawing youngsters into weird club meetings to hang out with a bunch of ancient totally-not-CBers.

I think a big challenge with that is the no-crypto-on-airwaves policy. It severely limits what you can control/observe over radio if everyone in the same area can do the same.

A lot of the gatekeeping and lack of interest in SDR, GNURadio, etc is from the older HAMs. Having local clubs with upper age limits of 45 or so might encourage more digital experimentation and openness to the kinds of innovation that used to go hand-in-hand with amateur radio clubs.

A friend of mine who's in his mid-20s works at an infosec firm where he and quite a few of his colleagues have recently obtained ham licences.

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.

The old elmers have every right to run their club the way they want and use the bands too. Just start up a new club. Pretty easy these days.

HN Hams anyone? :-)

I’m too lazy to run it but happy to hop on.

Same.

Same

I think it’s a case of finding the right club. I’m licensed in Canada along with my dad and it took us a while to find a good club where we live (Toronto). A good club, IMO, has a mix between old and new technologies and that’s been in line with my experience in the hobby so far

"a good club where we live" implies the existence of more than one club...

It's true, many of the clubs have not been doing a good job of marketing themselves to younger hams. Check out the photos at the top of the websites for a couple of our local clubs:

https://www.paara.org/

https://www.fars.k6ya.org/

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.

I’m above the age limit for your club, and have done plenty with GNU Radio.

https://github.com/madengr

See https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjt.html.

The spread of activity of FT4 and FT8 is worldwide and extremely active.

Another issue is the obsession with regulating implementation, there really should not be any other terms to follow beyond power and general FCC interference guidelines. The stuff on encryption is obsolete and puts up unnecessary barriers in this day and age.

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