Nice post Henry,
I can relate to some of what you pointed out. Particularly the
unfriendly club members. I have two friends who have wanted to be hams
since they were kids: one is 60 and one is 68. They are both now at a
point in their lives where there is no time or money impediment to
getting into ham radio. I took them to our contest club meeting and
only one guy was even remotely sociable and two guys were hostile and
arrogant. I took them to a different club meeting and no one was
friendly the whole evening. This despite out best efforts to circulate
and get things started and all the introductions I could muster. They
both went away non-plussed and neither has actually gotten a license.
Contrast this with our Harley club. I took a guest who was thinking of
getting a Harley. He was introduced, toasted, chatted up by a stead
line during the breaks, inviting to ride along on the next event, etc.
Ham Radio is dying and Harley is booming. Gee, I wonder why?
So I would have to agree with Henry that we are our own worst enemies.
--- A9xw@cs.com wrote:
> There were lots of replies. Some marked private which is OK. Some
> good
> threads came out that were not fully touched on but then, this isn't
> a book!
>
> kids and lids: I knoe from experience how hard it is as a kid to get
> someone
> to tell you what and how to get a license. When I was about 6 i
> built a
> radio from a library book, heard some CW, copied it down then
> decoded it,
> got on my bike and DF'ed my way to the hams house. Turned out to be
> the
> father of a school friend. I rang the bell and when he answered the
> door I
> told him I had built a radio (in my hand) and had heard his signal
> and found
> him by riding around until the signal was strongest then noticed an
> antenna.
> his first response was to look at the home made radio and tell me it
> wasn't
> his problem that it picked up his signal and not the local Am radio
> station.
> I finally got him to show me his stuff, got the 3 cent tour and was
> told it I
> could never be a ham because I was too young and didnt understand
> anything
> about it. Shucks, I was only 6 and had already built several radios
> that
> worked from library books and one Allied radio kit. Yeah, i didn't
> know CW or
> ohm's law, and he wasn''t about to be bothered with a kid. But I
> knew enough
> to write down dots and dashes and look up the letters in morse code,
> and find
> his house by listning for the strongest signal! Later the family
> moved
> vack to Chicago. I spotted a ham antenna (wire) across the street. i
> was just
> sytarting high school. Similar experience, no I wasn't there to
> compalin
> about TVI. OK, he only worked 160 once ina while. no he didn't care
> that I
> built a 160 meter receiver in a cigar box from an article in
> Electronics
> illustrated. slam. My girl friend's dad also turned out to be a
> ham. not
> even a shack tour. When I was 21 I was working at a TV facility
> next to a
> Red Cross building and one nite the cars with the antennas were there
> so I
> invited myself to the club meeting. only one person introduced
> themselves. I
> already had 3 years broadcast experience and my first class ticket.
> After
> three meetings I found one person that would tech me CW and help me
> get my
> novice ticket. It aint easy to become a ham.
>
> Where do we go fomr here.
> there have been a lot of good ideas tossed out over the years. in
> the 1960's
> after getting my novice license WN8HEE, I produced and distributed a
> 60
> second TV PSA (public service announcement) to over 300 TV stations.
> I wrote
> to ARRL and told them about it. I got the local club on 15 Michigan
> and ohio
> TV stations to promote the ham fest, biggest attendence they had
> despite
> blizzard. ARRL reponse: nothing. I got a service award for
> participating
> in a Simulated emergency test. BFD. The city of Toledo sent me a
> nice
> certificate because on the way to the TV station there to discuss ham
> radio
> on an interview show, I happened on a auto accident and did some CPR.
> but had
> to call on the CB radio to get help because no one was on the local
> repeaters. Similar experience in Terre haute when a Semi hit a VW
> buss head
> on and the driver was in the third row back and the truck driver was
> on the
> pavement after going through the windshield. 4 dead, 5 injured, one
> was taken
> still pinned in the seat to the ambulance doa.
>
> So, if you're going to put up a repeater, do so if there are enough
> people to
> use it that its useful when really needed. have a public access 911
> phone
> patch if you don't bother to listen to your own machine.
>
> After getting my tech ticket I recorded and sent out 13 programs for
> radio
> called the Marconi experiment. it was on about 50 stations late
> nite. It
> included live QSO's recorded witht eh knowledge and permission of the
>
> stations, who would often express that they knew it would be on the
> radio
> show. We did live in studio interviews (live to tape) . We didn't
> have a
> bunch of UFO and conspiracy BS or psudo science, just discussions of
> the fun
> of ham radio and what was going on in those early days of FM
> repeaters and
> good band openings, DX RTTY and such.
>
> managed to get into TV guide on a few occasions and a few other non
> ham mags.
> Not a large response, but any PR is good PR. made it to NBC nightly
> news.
> Helps.
>
> When I owned my own radio station I broadcast a ham radio program and
> CW
> lessons after regular programming and before sign-off. Don't know
> what the
> response was, but it was an effort.
>
> Now if 100 hams did this, imagine what we might have been able to
> do! if
> ARRL had helped sponsor or if any of the ham manufacturers had helped
> sponsor
> the efforts, imagine what might have been possible. No one within
> the ham
> biz lifted a finger.
>
> At an Industry meeting at Dayton many years ago, the producer of a TV
> series
> (ALF?) came in and said to the group how we could produce a TV
> program using
> inexpensive TV gear (the video toaster) that he was using to do the
> commercial show. Would anyone help out to defray the costs of
> production,
> which to meet Broadcast TV standards meant post production, audio
> sweetning
> and talent costs. he had a demo tape, made a good pitch. the room
> divided
> equally in half. one half said ARRL should pay for it, the other
> half said
> they wouldn't pay for it. So it never happened.
>
> A few years later I tried to promote hams getting LPTV licenses and
> not long
> ago low power FM licenses. you could cover the metropolitan market
> with these
> and could broadcast anything you wanted, make money and retrans NASA
> select,
> your local ham club meeting, other ham activities like Field Day.
> Nobody did
> it. The licenses could have been had for a few thousand in
> application
> costs. Today most of LPTV stations are worth a half million to
> several
> million bucks. Instead a lot became Home Shopping outlets raking in
> millions
> of bucks profit a year, Trinity religion stations, Video juke
> Boxes, etc.
> A low power Fm station, 100 watts at 100 feet would fit on many ham
> towers,
> covers a radius of 15 miles. Will anyone put one on for ham radio?
> Not
> likely. Costs 10 cents an hour to run.
>
> I used to give away "The Good Image Award" for hams that got good
> press for
> their public relations work. I gave up after 1985 because there
> wasn;t
> enough "press" being generated to make a contest of it. Not much
> beyond the
> field day blurb in the local small town papers.
>
> When it comes to promoting our hobby, most hams are our own worst
> enemies.
> Even the people who stand to make a buck if ham radio thrives don't
> want to
> help out. "QST ads are too expensive" is the lament, "can't afford
> to
> advertise in QST and then have anything left for the other
> magazines." QRT
> Ham Radio magazine. QRT FM Magazine, and a dozen others.
>
> An interesting question in my mind has always been, "Would Heathkit
> be alive
> and well today if the owners had been better business people instead
> of
> robber barons who it seems just bought the company to ransack its
> profits for
> other losing operations like ZENITH bankrupt at last?"
>
> With CABLE channels it seems to me that it should be even easier to
> get some
> ham radio promotion since we don;t have to rely on a handful of
> network owned
> TV stations and mega radio station groups controlling 90% of the
> broadcast
> airways. have we seen the last "Ham's Wide World" movie extolling
> the
> virtues of tubes and CW? Lets hope so. Valiant efforts, but wrong
> message,
=== message truncated ===
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