[CQ-Contest] Interesting Youth In Ham Radio (was Digest)

[Sean Waite]

Have you seen the fairly sizeable maker movement? Arduinos and raspberry
pis sell like hot cakes. Even some of my only slightly technical friends
are using them for DIY home automation and such. I'm an odd man out in my
generation because I like soldering discrete components and tube gear, but
that doesn't make us any less technical. We've just moved our skills
further up the stack.

Frankly, it's this attitude that is keeping younger people out of the
hobby. I really respect your work, Jim, your materials on RFI suppression
are seminal and extremely helpful, but please reconsider your stance. We
won't get new people if we stick to the old ideas. Yes, we'll always need
people who understand the low lying guts of electronics, but there is a
whole realm out there beyond. We no longer need to understand how to build
many things from discrete components, ICs and uCs do most of the heavy
lifting. We can focus on the task - like the doorbell that sends an SMS
that my friend made, or an Internet connected weather station from scratch,
or little robots that drive around, or whatever, and we don't need to focus
on the individual circuits. It's a disadvantage maybe because we don't know
how all of the circuits on that board work, but an advantage because we
don't have to spend years and years to learn how to build a device that
interacts with a network from first principles.

I do love the stories of scrounging together a radio from parts found in a
scrap bin, and maybe one day I will try it myself, but just because our
hobby isn't like your hobby doesn't make it any lesser.

Sean WA1TE

On Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 18:27 Jim Brown <k9yc at audiosystemsgroup.com> wrote:

> On 11/13/2017 11:51 AM, Ria Jairam wrote:
> > Question - do you actually interact with younger people? Or do you
> > simply look down on them?
>
> You obviously didn't read my email.
>
> 73, Jim
>
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