brainwagon

Jeff KE9V, over at KE9V.net is once again falling victim to pessimism about amateur radio. I can’t help but shake my head at the effort that we as hams seem to put into lamenting the impending death of our hobby.

It’s very strange. I can’t think of another hobby that spends as much time as we seem to in the following three activities:

1. Lamenting the impending doom of amateur radio, principally because so few newcomers enter the hobby, while simultaneously…
2. Grouching that all the newcomers in the hobby are wrecking the hobby because of their lack of desire to do things the way what we all learned, and yet
3. Spending all sorts of time trying to lure people into believing that our hobby is fun.

I prefer a different tactic.

If our hobby really was fun, we wouldn’t need to work at recruiting people: they would just happen naturally. We couldn’t keep them out of our hobby. If they don’t think amateur radio is fun, it’s probably best to assume that it’s not fun, at least for them. Something about the way we present ham radio to them makes them believe it isn’t fun. Many would argue that the man on the street just doesn’t understand what fun amateur radio is, but I would submit that the average ham doesn’t understand what fun is, or what the average young person would consider is fun.

Me? I just try to talk about the things which I think are fun, particularly things that can be done with minimal amounts of money and modest investment of time. I’ll leave the anxiety of the future of the hobby to others. I’d rather just keep plodding along, doing what I like, and trying to engage targets of opportunity who read about what I like as often as I can.