[CQ-Contest] Will there be anyone to work in 20 years?

[Kelly Taylor]

If you're part of the generation that has felt the glow of at least one
vacuum tube that was not part of a final amplifier, there will be a good
enough supply of QSOs to keep you going for the rest of your life,

However,

The biggest issue facing ham radio is this: it's just not cool or unique any
more.

We'll show a kid all the study manuals, Morse code instruction, excavation,
yards of concrete, guy wires, coaxial cable, rotator cables, safety
harnesses, tower climbing, late nights and early mornings, our $4,900
IC-7600, computer of whatever form, specialized room in the house, fancy
magnetic Begali paddle, Rigblaster Pro and Heil headset that it takes to
work Germany.

And when we see the look of horror on his face, we show him a $200 HW-101
hooked up to a $200 used R-8 and say it can do a lot of the same.

And then the kid pulls out his $40-a-month cellphone, pulls in his Skype or
Viber app and calls Russia, Germany, Japan, etc. for free.

Our generation thought radio was cool largely because we could do what few
others could do (at least cheaply). That's gone.

And THAT's just to get folks into ham radio. Try to get them into
contesting, and they'll see pictures of Radio Arcala, KC1XX, W3LPL or even a
smaller station such as KA9FOX; they see the contest calendar, where they
have to wait until October, November and March to find the really big ones
and then they see petty, arcane, and often nasty, discussions about the
minutiae of rules...

And then they turn on xBox and connect instantly to a gaming crowd where
they get their thrills right then, right now, and haven't had to engineer a
way to rotate a 160-meter beam at 300 feet in the Finnish arctic, and
haven't had to argue whether a K1-W6 is 3 points or four...

Couple that with the typical ham radio display at shopping malls, where you
have a couple of sexta- or septuagenarians trying to convince today's kids
that it's still anywhere near cool to walk around with an IC-02AT on your
belt and a speaker mic on your lapel...

(Look kids, with only a few month's studying and $300 you too can look like
a rent-a-cop!)

What's the answer? I don't know. But I do know the current recruiting
methods aren't it. And I'm not convinced anything, really, will work.

73, kelly
ve4xt


On 5/24/13 10:18 PM, "Steve Dyer" <w1srd at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Competition for attention is the issue, not lack of another specialized
> category.
> 
> Immediate feedback. Real-time scoring. More dynamic team play. This is what we
> need to be developing to attract a new generation of contesters.
> 
> We are competing with online gaming. That's the way we need to think about how
> to attract the next generation.
> 
> Many ideas that have been floated by many individuals along these lines. The
> recent series in NCJ on game design was great. N0AX's talk at Visalia was spot
> on.
> 
> Kudos to CQWW for moving in the right direction, but as long as print magazine
> publishing dates drive results posting, don't count on the radical innovation
> we need from the major contests.
> 
> 73,
> Steve
> W1SRD
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
>  From: "Shane Mattson-->K1ZR" <k1zr at comcast.net>
> To: cq-contest at contesting.com
> Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 8:55 AM
> Subject: [CQ-Contest] Will there be anyone to work in 20 years?
>  
> 
> Fellow contesters,
> 
> 
> 
> We have a much bigger problem than the top 5 topics discussed on this
> reflector ad nauseam.
> 
> 
> 
> Open the CQWW presentation Randy presented during Dayton this year:
> 
> 
> 
> http://cqww.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/CQ-WW-for-Dayton-Contest-For
> um-2013.pdf
> 
> 
> 
> Go to slide 15.  Look at the data in the first 3 columns.   The future does
> not look good for this sport unless we find a way to attract more youth to
> ham radio and contesting, especially in the US. 
> 
> 
> 
> Something to ponder during the off-season.  At the very least I recommended
> adding a special category in CQWW to recognize competition amongst the
> youth.
> 
> 
> 
> -Shane K1ZR
> 
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