and most housing developments are not ham radio friendly. To be very
competitive requires lots of antennas or a guest station while having a
top end gaming rig is no big deal.
I think a good portion of the new hams are getting licenses for helping
with emergency services, Red Cross, storm chasing, etc.
My youngest has a license and I wish he showed more interest. He has an
Xbox, computer, smartphone and that is what interests him.
While chasing a carrot on a stick is a popular gaming strategy where you
are always chasing the best stuff, it is not followed by all. Many
people want games filled with people, especially the shoot em ups where
that provides more victims per se. When the population falls off the
game starts to die.
It is great that we are getting more people to send in logs. We know
that a great many people do not operate the majority of the hours in the
contests, so my question is: if we go back 10 or 20 years what is the
percentage of serious entries compared to now and what is the percentage
of part timers then and now.
I fear that we are are the peak of contesting and from here out as the
ham population continues to age the entries will start to fall off.
I am with Kelly and I really have no answers on how to attract new blood
to fold.
Mike W0MU
On 5/26/2013 11:35 AM, David Gilbert wrote:
Dragging out that old, tired, and mostly erroneous accusation of
"instant gratification" is totally missing the point. I spend a fair
amount of time myself playing online multiplayer games, a genre that
is predominantly comprised of people in the age range of 14-35 (pretty
much the same age bracket that hams belonged to about 50 years ago).
Guess what one of the dominant themes in most of those games are ...
it's called "progression", which means starting at a very low, almost
useless level and having to scratch and claw your way up the ladder as
you acquire and learn how to use new and more complicated skills.
It's a process that can take months for a new player, and trust me ...
it's WAY more complicated than memorizing multiple choice answers for
a license exam.
Want to know the fastest growing demographic for video games, out of
the 100 million or so who play semi-regularly? It's women with a
median age around 30. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't characterize women
as being lazier than men.
http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp
http://www.theonlinemom.com/secondary.asp?id=2106
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/More_videogame_players_moving_online_survey_999.html
The simple facts are that video games today offer a much more
compelling way to efficiently and effectively interact with others
around the globe than ham radio does. There is no way that ham radio
is going to be relevant to today's youth like it was to us. All in
all, ham radio is the least reliable, most restrictive, most limited,
and most expensive way to communicate with anyone else short of a
large scale natural disaster ... not to mention having far greater
barriers (license, neighborhood restrictions, building permits, etc)
to participation. There is simply no comparison.
o Ham radio is far more expensive.
o Ham radio has far worse quality than Skype or cellphones (which
are now a gaming platform in their own right).
o Ham radio is bulky, predominantly fixed, and requires a
significant amount of exterior hardware that can be problematic in
many housing areas.
o You can't share music or pictures with decent resolution via ham
radio.
o Worldwide, there are at least 1,000 cell phone users for every
amateur radio licensee, and that ratio is probably closer to 10,000
when considering active hams. The ratio is much higher yet when you
add in PCs that can do anything a ham rig can ... except better. If
you want to interact with someone ... anyone ... why limit yourself to
a very small fraction of the world's population?
o Applications like Skype are free, available worldwide, and provide
FM quality voice from any PC to anyone anywhere in the world anytime
of day or night. If you really want to communicate, you don't rely on
the F2 layer.
o Ham radio is one-dimensional ... pretty much all you can do is
talk. Cell Phones and PC's allow active interaction (such as via
multiplayer games or other features) that create a rich and dynamic
environment instead of simply a conversation. In any modern online
game you are immersed in colorful graphics that are simply amazing,
and you interact with the environment and multiple other players
directly and in real time.
o Contesting in ham radio is an isolated activity ... you sit in a
chair for as many of the 48 hours you can physically tolerate doing
the same rote activity over and over, while your competitors
independently do the same thing. In online games, you compete
directly in real time by anticipating your opponent's moves and
abilities, countering them, and attacking with your own abilities ...
often trying to utilize a complex environment to your advantage. It's
a multiple dimensional activity that involves establishing your own
strategy (often as a team) and trying to counter the strategies of
your opponents. The closest analogy I can think of for radiosport is
if we had the ability to somehow decrease an opponent's score in real
time during the contest through our own ability or by offsetting his.
I've tried to think of ways to do this but so far I've not come up
with much.
o Ham radio no longer is a vehicle for learning anything relevant to
a future career. There is some impressive technology in today's ham
rigs but I'd bet there isn't a soul out there today who would decide
to get into ham radio so he/she could learn how to write DSP software
or program an FPGA. It mostly works the other way around ... hams who
learned those things elsewhere decided to apply them to their hobby.
Having a ham radio license listed on your resume isn't going to elicit
any better consideration than antique car restoring or skeet shooting.
Playing a video game isn't going to get you hired either, but at least
the platform you're staying familiar with (PCs and cellphones) comes
from the current century.
I can pretty much guarantee that almost none of us, if we were kids
today, would take the trouble to get a ham license. The ONLY thing
that ham radio in general can claim in it's favor is that there isn't
a subscription fee, but that is pretty much irrelevant when you
consider that cell phones, PCs, and connections to the internet are
going to exist in great numbers without ham radio anyway. Think we
can convince anyone, even ourselves, to toss their cell phone or PC
and rely strictly on ham radio?? Good luck with that.
There is indeed one aspect of ham radio that has some enduring merit,
though, and that is contesting. Competition is competition no matter
the vehicle, and some of the relative negatives of ham radio (scarcity
of participants, unreliable propagation, etc) actually become part of
the appeal. The problem is that represents a VERY narrow slice of the
world (partly because there are so many vehicles to engage in
competition ... heck, there are even competitive BBQ events), and ham
radio at a competitive level simply is not accessible for very many
people. Most of us on this reflector love to contest via ham radio,
but that's because we grew up with ham radio ... not because we were
seeking competition and decided that ham radio was the most effective
way to satisfy that itch. I guarantee that it isn't ... a $250 PC
will open up far more opportunities to reliably compete with far more
other participants in a far more complex environment far less
expensively than ham radio could ever dream of.
In my opinion, our hobby has strictly niche appeal and in spite of the
misleading license figures it is a dying one. As best I can tell from
the limited figures I've seen the average age of hams now increases
almost two years for every three years that go by. Look at pictures of
hams from any recent convention (Dayton, Visalia, etc) or club meeting
and compare them to pictures from thirty years ago ... it's almost
shocking. I'm all for encouraging new people to join ham radio, and
especially for encouraging existing hams to become contesters, but it
is delusional to think that we can do much of anything to
significantly affect the overall demographics. There are simply too
many better options.
Even worse, it's ridiculous to blame the situation on "a desire for
instant gratification by the younger generation." That's such a
head-in-the-sand misrepresentation that all it demonstrates is how out
of touch most of us are.
Dave AB7E
On 5/26/2013 7:10 AM, Cqtestk4xs@aol.com wrote:
...and you forgot one other thing.
Today's young people live in an instant gratification society. Why
spend
time studying for a license to talk to someone in Russia when you can
do it
today on Skype. I applaud the efforts of those who are doing lots of
work
to encourage people to get into the hobby, but it is a tough battle.
Bill K4XS
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