.EDITOR'S NOTE: The following was originally composed as radio copy for air on FEBRUARY 21st, 2004 in a feature entitled THE RANDOM ACCESS FILE over THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO, North America's premier amateur radio audio news service. Please click on the following http://www.twiar.org/ for additional details.
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Listen to this: Everything old is new again. Did you hear this? Everything old is new again. BAH! Sorry.I don't buy it. How about this one: If you haven't seen it before, then it's new to you. Did you copy this? Do you see what a pantload this is?
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A question: How does this apply to amateur radio? An answer: Amateur radio is a legion, a very small legion of old men. Mostly old men with some old women. And maybe just a few babies. I'm going to define "baby" here as anyone under the age of 40.
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But it's mostly old men who spend much of their free time peering backward into the past instead of exploring forward into the future with this hobby, much less thinking outside the box. Mostly old men. Hell, I'm an old man myself at 52. At the very least, I am a lot older than I was. Old enough and a ham long enough to be a member of the Quarter Century Wireless Association. But I'm not interested. Most of the hams in this country are now over 55. In the context of the religious TV zealot:
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THESE ARE THE END DAYS OF AMATEUR RADIO!
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No young ones. No apprentices. No fledglings. Or at least, a very, very few. No one stepping on board to join us and ultimately carry on for us mostly old men and some old women into the next generation. Perhaps the first clue drifted into focus say two decades back. Maybe at your local ham club meeting, where, with some wringing of the hands, there was a steadily intensifying and temple throbbing realization that cable TV with its newborn Music Television was seducing our youth and stealing their very valuable discretionary time away. More time for the MTV. Less time for the amateur radio.
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MTV's fraternal twin then emerges forth from the media womb. Home video games, PONG and Missile Command, act as electronic parasites to our Quasars, our Sonys, our Toshibas, our Pioneers and our Emersons. More time for the Atari. Less time for the amateur radio. Easier to *pay* for the MTV and the PONG. Or at least for the parents to pay. Than to bone up on basic radio theory. And pound away at the straight key.
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The speculation at the meeting closes quickly because the featured speaker tonight is going to discuss the history of the Amphenol PL-259 connector. To any teen sitting in the crowd, he might as well take a hypodermic needle and insert toilet bowl cleaner directly into the jugular.
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Does anyone see this problem?
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If MTV and Atari did not chew up enough numbers of potential fledglings, then certainly the two Bills finished the job. The one Bill - Gates - hand delivered his not-quite-ready-for-prime-time Microsoft Windows 3.1 into our 1990's vintage TinkerToy PCs while the other Bill - Clinton - opened the floodgates of a heretofore quite obscure, very esoteric but also very powerful global inter exchange data network known to insiders as the Internet and of course, he pitched the whole schmear to the great unwashed as the Super Information Highway.
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Another decade passes.
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3.1 matures into XP. Unix morphs into 31 flavours of Linux. Atari passes the baton to XBOX, GameCube and PlayStation 2. 25 pound bagphones give way to Nextel. More time for file sharing. More time for Sonic the Hedgehog. Certainly, less time for amateur radio. But again, the speculation at the meeting closes quickly because the featured speaker tonight is going discuss how to build a two-meter groundplane antenna out of couple of Dollar Store coat hangers. To any teen sitting in the crowd, he might as well take a hypodermic needle and insert toilet bowl cleaner directly into the jugular.
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We hams did good there for a while: Single sideband. Solid state. FM repeaters. Packet radio. Amateur radio satellites. Hams in space. Cool stuff! We dug it! The kids didn't. And then, while most of us hams sought to reminisce about the good ole' days with all those G*d-awful mold encrusted radio resurrection articles that still play each month in the QST and the CQ. Every month, yet another face-the-rear compendium on the HeathKit DX100, the Collins 75A4, various ribbon microphones from the 1930's and the many ways you can scrape and expunge caked and crumbly rust from the five-watt resistors hand soldered to the underside of a metal chassis.
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Meanwhile, commercial interests were quietly pioneering and exploiting things like: Trunked repeater systems. Cellular telephone environments. Wifi wireless computer networks. Voice Over IP. Personal communications devices so small that you could easily drop them into a toilet. Cool stuff! We dig it! The kids dig it! It's transparent to the kids but they don't care. They just enjoy the end-user benefits.
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My Number One And Only Son, Zachary, now at milepost 8 on his own personal expressway of life in the fast lane really gets into his brand-shiny-new Motorola T5950 FRS radios. The very expensive Motorola T5950 Family Service Radios.It's not ham radio but he does love to talk any chance he gets to his friend who is a girl Jessica, number one of two daughters belonging to our own George W2XBS. It's not ham radio but it is a start. The FRS appears to be a better deal than the 27 Megacycle CB hell-hole that many of us cut our eyeteeth on many moon ago. Mostly likely though, neither Zach nor Jess will ever enter the hallowed halls of hamdom, but maybe it's not such a big deal. There is so much more out there for them to explore. There may be no time for amateur radio. So much new technology. I'll bet in a year or two, Zach and Jess will pitch the FRS radios for the Nextels or maybe every one of those tiny little pocket phones with the TV screens so they can see each other in some kind of reasonable color. So tiny, that you know at least one of those phones will most likely be accidentally dropped into a toilet.
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In the end for the rest of us, in the end days of amateur radio, there is nothing really wrong with being old. And nothing really wrong with reading about old things. And nothing really with doing old things. Just don't expect the kids to get involved. But every once in a blue moon sometimes, maybe one young fledgling may heed the call and so we must nurture the little grasshopper as best we can and shield the fledgling from our ugly ham radio politics and petty turf squabbles but we should change the name from Elmer to Ozzie (Osbourne, that is) so he can better relate.
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After all, one new member is better than none.
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