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Ham Radio Still Growing In the iStuff Age
vhfer writes "From NPR comes this story about old-school communications in the age of Twitter: 'Only a few years ago, blogs listed ham radio alongside 35 mm film and VHS tape as technologies slated to disappear. They were wrong. Nearly 700,000 Americans have ham radio licenses — up 60 percent from 1981, a generation ago. And the number is growing.' The article goes on to say that while there's plenty of 60-plus year old hams, there's also a growing contingent of teens. I just met a 14-year-old, licensed in 2009. Getting rid of the Morse Code requirement sure helped in that regard. So does the fact that the test questions (and the answers) are freely available, legally, on the Internet. Study, take the test, hang the license certificate on the wall. Your geek cred gets an immediate boost. And who knows? Maybe the next time there's a Haiti-earthquake-sized disaster, you'll be one of the thousands of ham volunteers who provided the only communications in/out of Haiti for weeks following the quake, not to mention all of the tactical comms the country had for nearly a month."
I'm not sure you're actually correct that thousands of hams provided the only communications out of Haiti after the earthquake and all fo the tactical coms. While there were a few messages coming out of Haiti over amateur radio there wasn't much. Cell phones were brought back up pretty quickly and a friend of mine who was in Haiti doing relief work after the quake (Specifically as a comms officer for a relief org) said that he had very little use for HF as satellite connections were brought up pretty quickly. He did say there was some use of VHF to establish local communications between relief orgs and various med stations etc but that other communications came up quickly enough that amateur radio didn't play as big of a role as many would like us to believe. If you want a great technical hobby where there's a lot to learn and an opportunity to make friends all over the world become a ham. You might get an opportunity to help out in a disaster, but if your main goal is to help out in emergencies, get trained in CPR, Search and Rescue and other such, but don't count on being a ham to put you in the "Most needed" category. There is a place for amateur radio in disaster relief, but it's as a backup, not a primary communications method. The fact is the pros can do a better job than we can.
Isn't it ironic that Ham Radio is meant to be a communications system for amateurs?
Up until the 80s, ham radio was about doing something that there was no other way to do. Talk to people around the world "for free", without depending on any one else (like the phone company) to make it possible. It really was a magical thing.
But then the internet came along and ham radio started to die because the internet completely replaced a major part of what made ham radio cool. And so for the last 20 years or so ham radio has been in a sort of limbo and decline due to the rise of computers and the internet.
But now we're entering a new era, one where "well, duh, of course I could just twitter to people around the world, but communicating via radio is actually more fun". It's now interesting because it's sort of an antique rather than in spite of it.
There's a progression where things go from "valuable" to "junk" to "collectible". The trick is to avoid throwing them away during the "junk" phase, because eventually they get old enough that they become interesting again.
G.