[Towertalk] The Ham Radio Business

[WYsixK]

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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