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Comment by hibby | Hacker News Reader

I saw this shared on Twitter this morning, and had some thoughts: While the graph is good, it is specific to the US and ignores the fact that a large amount of the amateur population is 50+ - the hobby is healthy now, but there's an age crisis coming soon. It doesn't really reflect the health of the entire hobby, globally, just a specific subset.

Millenials aren't young any more, I'm millenial and I've held a ham license for over a decade - since my 20s. We're creeping in to middle age now, and are somewhat past killing anything. We need Zoomers - Gen Z to be interested, and the first step is probably not mislabeling them as millenials!

That said, there's a robust discussion to be had around this topic. I absolutely love my hobby, the things it makes me do and the constant stream of projects it gives me, but one day I do fear there won't be any folks on the radio for me to talk to at the end of the projects.

I've got friends in the local hacklab interested, and I'm trying to set up a /good/ station there to let us play, teach and share more with people who aren't licensed... but it's really just a slow, expensive passion project!

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> a large amount of the amateur population is 50+

Yes, and a lot of these folks take a "get off my lawn" approach to anything that's different to how amateur radio has been done for the last 50 years. Try talking up metro-wide mesh data network or using packet radio for anything other than APRS you get the "Why would you want to do that?" Once upon a time amateur radio operators MADE their own equipment: it was the maker space par excellence long before the term came into being.

There is so much that can be done with digital, SDR, and hybrid/fusion over-the-air and internet modes. We could probably advance the hobby further and faster by creating new amateur radio clubs specifically aimed at younger, more technical makers and experimenters and specifically excluding people who think talking about the weather on a local repeater is the height of the craft. Yes, its elitist, agist snobbery but if amateur radio isn't a home for hackers and makers it's going to die within our lifetimes.

There's also more than a fair share of OM spouting off about their gout, dieabeetus, negroes, and Jeezus.

Phone frequencies are a real cesspool most of the time.

I assume you're being downvoted because of the terms you're using, but you're not wrong.

Extra class licensee here. On phone (Single Sideband "SSB" or FM typically, for those not familiar with the terminology, where you use radio for voice rather than data/Morse) I've heard all kinds of absolutely reprehensible things. In one single conversation where a man was ranting about mask mandates, he managed to throw in derogatory use of the word "retarded," toxic masculinity insults, homophobia (including equating it to bestiality), racist innuendo, and even a call to arms to kill our governor if they wouldn't stop this mask mandate. Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it. It's one thing when people say these things in two-way conversations on HF, with lots of frequencies available to change to if you don't like what you hear. It's another when it's on the local FM repeater with a single frequency shared by thousands of people.

In order for amateur radio to thrive, it needs to be a welcoming and inclusive place to everyone. Young scouts - children! - of all genders, races, and backgrounds are learning ham radio and tuning into their local repeaters or working HF. I can't imagine what they or their parents thought if they happened to be listening in at that moment. Hams need to all be good to each other, and keep the negativity, insults, bigotry, and politics for your social media pages. Let's get back to talking about propagation, antennas, RFI in the shack, debating FT8, doing emergency prep, or even just discussing the weather.

Radio is public. These people need to be named and shamed.

An automated system for recording and archiving these public transmissions with their call signs attached as tags would probably be a good first step.

That's an understandable reaction but it's the wrong one.

People like that say the things they say for the attention it attracts to them. They are not ashamed of their dumbass bigoted opinions otherwise they wouldn't be transmitting halfway around the world in the clear. If you engage them in any way, even to try to shame them, you have already given them what they want. They are the trolls of amateur radio.

The right thing to do is what most of us hams do: spin the dial and find someone more pleasant to talk to.

There was a good thread on reddit about this recently and I firmly agree with this comment about how useless "spin the dial" is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/iatqth/a_lot_...

social ostracization and penalty has its time and place, and this is one of those occasions. Same reason cars have number plates.

I hear you, but the flip side is that this is a hobby. I did not get in it to get mad.

not mad at all. My take is that radio is not an ephemeral medium. These transmissions can be slurped down by an SDR, recorded, stored, analyzed, tagged, fingerprinted, indexed, et cetera. By keying up you are effectively making a statement of public record.

At the moment there isn't a financial incentive to perform this at any reasonable scale, but this doesn't mean that it can't be done at all.

This is a very extreme and authoritarian response to a very vocal minority. Who decides what isn't "compliant" with the rules you want to shame them for?

Just record it all and make it indexed/searchable.

Not discriminating here, just want to make it easier to correlate statements to the public record with public call signs.

Got it, you want to make it all but the punishment towards suppression of speech.

Mention about the independent country of Taiwan or the autonomy of Hong Kong on radio.. well you've enabled the punishment of said behavior on a very real level. (In this case that would be invoking the national security letters recently introduced)

Is this really worth it for a few people with terrible opinions?

My stance: Let people have stupid opinions, let them blow off steam, recognize that you don't agree with them, don't be their opinions.

Again, you seem to think that radio is ephemeral. It's not, and there is no expectation of privacy or anonymity when you key up. Perhaps you misunderstand what amateur radio is about.

For real...

You already have to drop your call letters every few minutes while you're on-air, by FCC regulation. HAM radio transmissions are also subject to FCC restrictions on "obscene or indecent" language.

If it crosses the line where it wouldn't be allowed on over-the-air TV, it's not allowed on HAM radio spectrum. You can report it, and with evidence it can lead to nasty fines and/or revocation of license.

You want to hear some of the crap I hear on 2m in London UK. I dumped my HT in the end so I don’t get annoyed.

CW and FT8 are generally best if you don’t want to deal with that sort. CW is much harder to put the effort in to be a dick and FT8 doesn’t have being a dick built into the protocol.

I love FT8/FT4. It's a safe place for introverts and those turned off by the vitriol on phone to experiment with propagation and get awards. But I want phone to be a safe place, too.

Completely agree. Perhaps we should get on air and outnumber them :)

Yes. There are different people with vastly different values out there.

> Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it.

You're feeding into their behavior. IMO We're seeing a huge conflict in culture: one side that is authoritarian against unpleasant language and the other that doesn't accept that (or the suggested changed). (That's a very simplified view of it)

To be honest, I see this more as a baby boomer thing than a Gen X thing. Gen X who are into technical things tend to be into digital things. I mean hey, give me a commodore 64 hooked up to a modem and I'm gonna have a good time. Other digital modes are all the same to me. I'm Gen X and I'm 50, and I'm gonna whine more about k-pop than digital modes.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but no one cares what GenX thinks. Apparently we didn't throw enough temper tantrums as children.

It's hard to agree with that line of reason. In my observation, GenX marketed themselves as the generation of apathy, and so eventually people became apathetic about them.

I think GenX didn't believe in marketing themselves. The concept makes this X-er chuckle quietly.

Funny things these "generations" are. It's just as if someone were drawing an arbitrary cutoff line every two decades, picking a random characteristic from the overall zeitgeist, and proclaiming it to define the people of that "generation"...

And people buying into the characteristics and tropes with shocking willingness

Boomers marketed GenX as the generation of slack and apathy, because we weren't impressed by their music. Richard Linklater was born in 1960...

We were too young to object at the time, and now we're stuck with it.

> Boomers marketed GenX as the generation of slack and apathy...

And we spend all day on Slack at work so clearly the Amateur Radio version of Slack/IRC has to be called "Apathy"!

More realistically: people playing with computers in the 80s/90s didn't complain enough about this being considered "nerdy", and now instead of "bicycles for the mind", we're stuck with digital toys designed to the lowest common denominator.

I feel like I am lucky, my club has a bunch of old dudes, but they are still learning and growing. A few years ago, I proposed adding a digital repeater, and it caused all kinds of trouble, but most of those folks left and now its great. We have awesome presentations on how to leverage raspberry pis, building portable battery packs, opensource VNAs, etc. But this is true, a lot of the hobby is very curmudgeon-y. Which is sad because there is so much cool tech.

Ham radio (the human component) seems to suffer from the DnD 3.5 problem.

A lot of people invested considerable effort into obtaining knowledge.

Once obtained, they were free to coast. I take it there's no true continuing ed requirement to maintain a license?

Now, protocol / technical change threatens to render all their existing knowledge outdated. And furthermore, require additional effort.

Unsurprisingly, they're resistant. Said without malice, because that's just human nature.

Continuing ed requirements are usually a gimmick or BS, but in this case it seems like they might be healthy for the hobby. Demonstrating growth / trying new things? A nice process to gently nudge those not still actively learning back into the lower classes.

I think this is generally true of many academic and scientific fields as well!

Good lesson for organizational engineering. Longer tenures in a job tend to increase risk aversion and technical conservatism.

So unless there's a mechanism to blunt that (and select for lifelong learners), you end up with a tyranny of outdated architects, opposed to any and all changes.

> continuing ed requirement to maintain a license?

Why would you gatekeep on something that is mostly a hobby and for volunteers. Putting a continuing ed requirement on that is just going to piss off people. People who build these networks are mostly volunteers and they put a lot of effort into this. I think there should be a bit of respect given for that.

I got involved with amateur radio ~20 years ago as a teenager Handled radio traffic for various marathons. Was a bunch of 60-70+ people and a few teenagers.

Got briefly involved a few years ago. Still dominated by 60-70+ year olds. Me and a friend in our early 40s were the “kids”

I got a technician license at 16 and joined the local club. I was surprised at how hostile the majority of the members were. Since I didn’t learn code, I couldn’t use the HF bands and talk to people a little more tolerant. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the hobby in general.

Yep, and in my experience the older people definitely lean towards the "law and order" and "follow the rules" side of things, which is very disappointing from a "hacker" sort of "question authority" ethos. You'd think the Venn diagram between trendy maker spaces with 18–40 year olds and amateur radio groups would be close to a circle, but there's hardly any overlap at all.

With the improvements and rising affordability of cellular networks, satellites, wifi, IoT protocols, etc. — not to mention to overall transition from analog to digital — will amateur radio even stay relevant?

> it was the maker space par excellence long before the term came into being.

Just to provide an example: I made a keyer in the 70s. The way to make a PCB was to get a 3x4 copper-coated board from Radio Shack, use a sharpie to draw your desired traces, then etch the board in an HCl bath. After that, you used an old-fashioned soldering iron to attach your components to the board. You became excellent at soldering ICs, to avoid the additional cost of using a plug-in socket.

(Now get off my lawn.)

An important aspect of Ham radio culture, which I think underlies this discussion around the morse requirement, is the degree of self-reliance that you have to demonstrate in order to get a license.

What happens if the power goes out? What happens if you suddenly can't get those cheap PCBs, laptops, and phones from China? How are you going to communicate with someone a long distance away if you can't access a computer or an internet with all the bandwidth you could ever desire?

I think many people (younger hams included) have grown up now with the assumption that all of these things will just always be available. That's a risky approach, and doesn't make for a society that is resilient to external shocks.

"Yes, and a lot of these folks take a "get off my lawn" approach to anything that's different to how amateur radio has been done for the last 50 years."

... which I don't find surprising and seems to fit, but what I was very surprised by was the tremendous amount of submission, and appeal, to authority that pervades HAM communities.

FCC regulations are not to be questioned. Even to discuss other, possible regulatory regimes or changes to rules is met with incredulity and sometimes outright hostility. God forbid one bring up issues of circumvention, etc.

I find it surprising because it is such a contract to the UNIX/FOSS community which places such a high cultural value on freedom and exploration of the gray areas of systems.

It's an odd cultural aspect of the HAM community ...

I agree with you that there's absolutely nothing wrong with discussing possible regulatory changes. But it's a different story if what is really going on here is that they want to follow the regs and you want to explore their "gray areas."

In the U.S., the entire HAM community exists at the FCC's pleasure and there are a lot of other interests out there who would be happy to take over their spectrum if the FCC woke up one day and decided it could be more productively used. Poking the FCC in the idea would be a pretty bad move for the community as a whole.

I’m not a ham but I totally agree with the old guard on rejecting digital. MAKING your own equipment is an essential aspect of why amateur radio is worth preserving — it makes the network very resilient. In a world where digital electronics become very hard to acquire, hams can still maintain essential communication by tearing out components from microwaves and landfills. No such chance if everyone’s dependent on RTL-SDR chips from eBay.

If ham radio goes digital then it’s just people wasting spectrum on something they could be doing on the Internet.

Being around after the collapse of civilization is neither the only nor the primary purpose of ham radio, and there's a world of difference between "not rejecting digital tech" and "everyone's dependent on RTL-SDR chips from eBay".

Two additional things from someone who has considered getting a license a few times, but never quite made the jump because it wasn't clear what for in the end:

- a bunch of interesting radio things are available without a license today - e.g. hunting for various signals with a cheap SDR receiver. Which could potentially be a way for ham communities to then get people deeper into it, but the communities seem quite distinct, or even hostile to each other (the latter is even worse between ham and non-licensed radio communities)

- online communities. For better or worse, thats what people look for today for niche interests, and dedicated ham communities often are ... not the best advertisement. (EDIT: but people are sharing plenty of links in this thread, so I'll have stuff to dig through)

A hackspace is probably a good environment to get people into it (my local ones don't seem to have active hams, but in theory).

EDIT: just noticed the username. Greetings to the Scottish Embassy!

Gosh it's weird to be recognised on HN for something good that I've done :D

I can't say I disagree with you. I got my ham radio license in my late 30's because radio has always fascinated the hell out of me, even as a kid. But when I was a kid, being able to talk to someone far away without incurring the cost of a long-distance phone call was still a novelty. The ubiquity of the Internet and smart phones took away that particular novelty.

I still have a radio (several, actually) and one day when I have a larger piece of property I may even set up a reasonable HF station to participate in contests and the like but right now it's hard to justify spending time on a hobby that has little productive value at the end of the day.

I would agree that online there are a bunch of loud "get off my lawn" type voicer (I remember a published article on one of the bigger ham forums, where the guy bemoaned that a local ham club advertised a event as a "maker" event to appeal to young people, to him maker was for women, i.e. home maker.)

But my local ham club was the most helpful, open, and interested group of people. Yes, they are mostly 65+ and some quite old, but they are doing new and interesting things, including many of the digital modes like the ones listed in the article. There is a group of about 5 of them, nicknamed the QRSS Mafia. They are using ultra low power (200mw and frequently less) to send signals to the opposite side of the planet. One of them was recieved 2500 miles away (New Mexico to Florida) on 8.5 microwatts. At the time it was the recorded world record for distance/power (on the planet, communicating with voyager 1 doesn't count.)

Here in the UK, we've seen a huge surge in people - especially younger people - getting licensed since lockdown, in large part because it's now possible to take your license exams online. I think that the RSGB (our ARRL) had severely under-estimated the amount of friction in the old examination system and the amount of pent-up demand created by things like RTL-SDR.

That’ll be also because the local club usual incompetence can’t get in the way with social distancing. I had so much trouble even going back a few years getting my license because most folk can’t organise a piss up in a brewery. RSGB were little help.

Eventually ML&S came through on this front with their training and examination courses which were excellent.

I've been to ham radio clubs and the age gap is real. I go to the meetups in the Chicago land area and only see about one or two people my age. The people my age are usually sons or daughters of the older people.

This is a big problem in the UK too.

The club I started in had a less pronounced issue, but we also went to the pub after the main meet, and there was a secondary, technical only night run by members of the club.

This made it a bit more welcoming and and less off putting to 20 year old me, but the local club up here meet once a week and it's a tight clique.

I don't even want to try to break in to it! That said, it's not a bad thing that clubs exist to serve their members if that's what they want to do, we'll just make our own, hopefully more friendly club run by guys in their 30s!

I got my license at age 15 in 1999. I'm 36 now, and still among the "young" people in the local club. That said, ham radio has been a huge, important part of my life, and is what inspired me to be an engineer. The people I've met through it, both young and old, have been really great.

I got my license 25 years ago and now I’m 50+. Even then the population skewed much older.

I never got into HAM and never really used it. I always thought the hobby would evolve into more of a digital Internet. The idea of chatting with voice is really not appealing. Too much like CB radios in the 1970’s.

I'm just about ready for my ten year renewal and almost 50. Same for me. I got it for the ability to use APRS and other higher power options for high altitude balloon tracking (project never got off the ground hurr).

Yeah I've been licensed for 25+ years and I'm still one of the younger hams here.

I was never really into random rag-chews / chats on repeaters or HF. I did a lot of public service - disaster relief and helping with fundraising walks/rides - but that's mostly dried up here. Still some room for hams to serve in other disaster roles.

Been doing a lot with SDRs but outside of ham radio.

This is why I've swerved off of getting into HAM. By popular perception (in my circles, and perception doesn't necessarily reflect reality) it's a chatroom for boomers (not necessarily a bad thing) waiting to report you to the FCC for any kind of experimentation (a bad thing), with a cost of entry of at least a hundred dollars for equipment that supports a fixed set of protocols with a very narrow use-case.

Radio just seems top closed off to get into asanything other than a passive listener.

Mid 20's Extra here... Experimentation is totally allowed. Either the FCC will ignore the complaint, or you are actually outside the (very lenient) experimentation rules.

That's good to know. Any reccommended place to get started (assuming I already own an rtl-sdr)?

> waiting to report you to the FCC for any kind of experimentation (a bad thing),

This is what always kept me away from HAM Radios. Everyone I knew that was into it was a huge stickler about the rules and would talk about all the bad stuff that should happen to rule breakers.

It was pretty unnerving.

One of the express purposes of the amateur radio service is to facilitate experimentation and innovation in radio technology, and the FCC grants special licenses for that purpose all the time. There's a significant amount of harm you can do with a radio, so willfully causing interference to other radio services will earn you a hefty penalty. You should definitely get into amateur radio if you have an interest, and maybe look into some of the instances the FCC actually issued fines - if you're not out to cause harm you have nothing to worry about.

Their bark is worse than their bite most of the time. Anecdote: One of the most often repeated exam questions in the UK is 'if you don't update your license every 5 years ... all manor of trouble will happen'. Well, life happened and I didn't do anything for over 15 years and then I wanted to get back in to radio and of course I expected to have to grovel and take the test again and whatnot, but no, the actual government body, Ofcom (UK FCC equiv.) didn't really seem to care and after confirming that I was still alive all was well, in fact it was completely automated I think.

Like most things in life, if you're not actually actively causing trouble things will probaby be ok. But yes, some amateurs do seem to be a rule loving/enforcing bunch. Anyone would think they were regulating something actually dangerous, like getting a driving licence.

(Note, I'm not belittling the importance of being a responsible amateur - just that a lot of the time the general tone seems a bit 'DO NOT DO' more than 'do...')

Well here's the thing. Most hams seem to be retired engineers. They are used to knowing and following rules and will fall over themselves in an attempt to correct even the slightest error in understanding or application. Not unlike many of us on HN.

However, the rules are actually not that hard to follow and part of getting your license is learning about those rules. The FCC views amateur radio as largely self-policing and will quite literally never go after an individual until they have had multiple complaints, issued several warnings, and have a documented pattern of intentional, malicious violation of the rules.

What's wrong with following the rules? Spectrum is shared after all...

Nothing wrong with following rules. But if you think you're going to be surrounded by legalists waiting to spring government fines on you for every slip-up, you might be incensed to turn back.

My dad is/was a ham. My experience growing up with ham radio in the house was so negative that it's just kinda a turn off for me. Going back to the early 90s, for a lot of those old boomer types ham was mostly just a way to out-do eachother by showing off their rigs. It's kind of disappointing to me that they have this awesome technology they could have been taking to the next level but instead just spend hours whistling into the mic and bragging. In addition I got a sense that many of the old guys were actively working as gatekeepers as a way to stroke their own egos.

These guys were a big part of the hobby for years and because of that the hobby has been stagnate. But from what it looks like it seems that they're swiftly being replaced by the newer generation of tinkerers in recent years which is pretty awesome.

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