A Dying Breed?

I think you're right - the hobby is going to die a slow death just like Assembly Language programmers. However, the need for the knowledge will never go away for the very reason that it always seems to be the only thing "that works" during catastrophes. Army Signal is a prime example - 99% of the soldiers in communications have no idea how the technology in the field actually works and I guarantee could not come up with non-field manual solution to many problems. Yet those few guys that "get it" will almost always be communicating.

The closest I ever got towards going for a HAM license was when my parents restricted use of the phone after hours. So my friend and I tried to learn morse code to communicate with flashlights across the street. I didn't like it and went and bought a CB radio instead.

As someone who has gained much pleasure from Amateur radio, I am sad to say that I think you are correct about its decline. I think its glory days were the 1930s through 1950s when vacuum tubes were supreme. Not only were the parts cheap and readily available, but the home made devices had real character then. An AM, or even an FM transmitter and receiver, was something most could understand and construct. They lit up, got very hot, used a ton of power, required metal bashing skills, and could kill you if you did not treat them with respect. They opened up a world of communication with far away places. Those not in on the hobby had little understanding of it, and could not access similar communications benefits.

Now the equipment is mostly products made up of LSI chips that do magic things, although no one really knows how they do it. These things have no character. They are cold and lifeless and run on 12 volts. Instead of requiring a morse key and operating skill they traffic in anonymous packets of data. The magic has gone. Everyone has cell phones and the internet which are much better at enabling contact between two particular people.

It is still true that in America radio hams can be very useful in national emergencies. Perhaps that is an indication that our emergency public safety and disaster relief communications capabilities are not as good as they should be. In Europe, the disaster agencies say that the last thing they want is a bunch of amateurs running around complicating their scene.

A controlled hierarchy of communications is more effective in managing critical resources in real time. If anyone can talk to anyone, the result will often be confusion. The Europeans are more organised than us because they tend to have centralised national agencies rather than the proliferation of local town and county, state and federal agencies typical of the United States. It is not simply that the official facilities get blown away, burned etc. in the disaster. It is more the case that different agencies have made different communications purchasing decisions and now have equipment that is incompatible with each other, or that they have programmed their fancy digital networks in different ways.

Finally, the current generation of our youth have the modern marvels of computer games, Internet, etc. to excite them, and this makes no demands on their understandig of physics or mathematics or mechanical skills. Ham Radio equipment must look to them like museum pieces rather than the futuristic magic it seemed to be for earlier generations. The old amateur radio licence exams have been watered down to make access easy but that will not be enough to keep this great old 20th century hobby going much longer.

Proclamations about the decline of Amateur Radio have been repeated over decades.

http://p1k.arrl.org/~ehare/hams_vs_population.jpg

does show a slight decline, but not one that, IMHO, justifies any conclusion that ham radio is going by the wayside.

As of the end of December, there were 655,800 licensees in the Amateur Radio Service. This is considerably more than the number of hams in what other posts in this thread have implied as the heyday of ham radio.

Ed Hare, W1RFI@arrl.org