[mikece]

> a large amount of the amateur population is 50+

Yes, and a lot of these folks take a "get off my lawn" approach to anything that's different to how amateur radio has been done for the last 50 years. Try talking up metro-wide mesh data network or using packet radio for anything other than APRS you get the "Why would you want to do that?" Once upon a time amateur radio operators MADE their own equipment: it was the maker space par excellence long before the term came into being.

There is so much that can be done with digital, SDR, and hybrid/fusion over-the-air and internet modes. We could probably advance the hobby further and faster by creating new amateur radio clubs specifically aimed at younger, more technical makers and experimenters and specifically excluding people who think talking about the weather on a local repeater is the height of the craft. Yes, its elitist, agist snobbery but if amateur radio isn't a home for hackers and makers it's going to die within our lifetimes.

[ssimpson]

I feel like I am lucky, my club has a bunch of old dudes, but they are still learning and growing. A few years ago, I proposed adding a digital repeater, and it caused all kinds of trouble, but most of those folks left and now its great. We have awesome presentations on how to leverage raspberry pis, building portable battery packs, opensource VNAs, etc. But this is true, a lot of the hobby is very curmudgeon-y. Which is sad because there is so much cool tech.

[ethbro]

Ham radio (the human component) seems to suffer from the DnD 3.5 problem.

A lot of people invested considerable effort into obtaining knowledge.

Once obtained, they were free to coast. I take it there's no true continuing ed requirement to maintain a license?

Now, protocol / technical change threatens to render all their existing knowledge outdated. And furthermore, require additional effort.

Unsurprisingly, they're resistant. Said without malice, because that's just human nature.

Continuing ed requirements are usually a gimmick or BS, but in this case it seems like they might be healthy for the hobby. Demonstrating growth / trying new things? A nice process to gently nudge those not still actively learning back into the lower classes.

[etrautmann]

I think this is generally true of many academic and scientific fields as well!

[ethbro]

Good lesson for organizational engineering. Longer tenures in a job tend to increase risk aversion and technical conservatism.

So unless there's a mechanism to blunt that (and select for lifelong learners), you end up with a tyranny of outdated architects, opposed to any and all changes.

[monksy]

> continuing ed requirement to maintain a license?

Why would you gatekeep on something that is mostly a hobby and for volunteers. Putting a continuing ed requirement on that is just going to piss off people. People who build these networks are mostly volunteers and they put a lot of effort into this. I think there should be a bit of respect given for that.

[jpmattia]

> it was the maker space par excellence long before the term came into being.

Just to provide an example: I made a keyer in the 70s. The way to make a PCB was to get a 3x4 copper-coated board from Radio Shack, use a sharpie to draw your desired traces, then etch the board in an HCl bath. After that, you used an old-fashioned soldering iron to attach your components to the board. You became excellent at soldering ICs, to avoid the additional cost of using a plug-in socket.

(Now get off my lawn.)

[porcine-flight]

An important aspect of Ham radio culture, which I think underlies this discussion around the morse requirement, is the degree of self-reliance that you have to demonstrate in order to get a license.

What happens if the power goes out? What happens if you suddenly can't get those cheap PCBs, laptops, and phones from China? How are you going to communicate with someone a long distance away if you can't access a computer or an internet with all the bandwidth you could ever desire?

I think many people (younger hams included) have grown up now with the assumption that all of these things will just always be available. That's a risky approach, and doesn't make for a society that is resilient to external shocks.

[vidanay]

There's also more than a fair share of OM spouting off about their gout, dieabeetus, negroes, and Jeezus.

Phone frequencies are a real cesspool most of the time.

[paulirwin]

I assume you're being downvoted because of the terms you're using, but you're not wrong.

Extra class licensee here. On phone (Single Sideband "SSB" or FM typically, for those not familiar with the terminology, where you use radio for voice rather than data/Morse) I've heard all kinds of absolutely reprehensible things. In one single conversation where a man was ranting about mask mandates, he managed to throw in derogatory use of the word "retarded," toxic masculinity insults, homophobia (including equating it to bestiality), racist innuendo, and even a call to arms to kill our governor if they wouldn't stop this mask mandate. Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it. It's one thing when people say these things in two-way conversations on HF, with lots of frequencies available to change to if you don't like what you hear. It's another when it's on the local FM repeater with a single frequency shared by thousands of people.

In order for amateur radio to thrive, it needs to be a welcoming and inclusive place to everyone. Young scouts - children! - of all genders, races, and backgrounds are learning ham radio and tuning into their local repeaters or working HF. I can't imagine what they or their parents thought if they happened to be listening in at that moment. Hams need to all be good to each other, and keep the negativity, insults, bigotry, and politics for your social media pages. Let's get back to talking about propagation, antennas, RFI in the shack, debating FT8, doing emergency prep, or even just discussing the weather.

[m0xte]

You want to hear some of the crap I hear on 2m in London UK. I dumped my HT in the end so I don’t get annoyed.

CW and FT8 are generally best if you don’t want to deal with that sort. CW is much harder to put the effort in to be a dick and FT8 doesn’t have being a dick built into the protocol.

[paulirwin]

I love FT8/FT4. It's a safe place for introverts and those turned off by the vitriol on phone to experiment with propagation and get awards. But I want phone to be a safe place, too.

[m0xte]

Completely agree. Perhaps we should get on air and outnumber them :)

[riffic]

Radio is public. These people need to be named and shamed.

An automated system for recording and archiving these public transmissions with their call signs attached as tags would probably be a good first step.

[bityard]

That's an understandable reaction but it's the wrong one.

People like that say the things they say for the attention it attracts to them. They are not ashamed of their dumbass bigoted opinions otherwise they wouldn't be transmitting halfway around the world in the clear. If you engage them in any way, even to try to shame them, you have already given them what they want. They are the trolls of amateur radio.

The right thing to do is what most of us hams do: spin the dial and find someone more pleasant to talk to.

[riffic]

There was a good thread on reddit about this recently and I firmly agree with this comment about how useless "spin the dial" is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/iatqth/a_lot_...

social ostracization and penalty has its time and place, and this is one of those occasions. Same reason cars have number plates.

[jimhefferon]

I hear you, but the flip side is that this is a hobby. I did not get in it to get mad.

[redwall_hp]

You already have to drop your call letters every few minutes while you're on-air, by FCC regulation. HAM radio transmissions are also subject to FCC restrictions on "obscene or indecent" language.

If it crosses the line where it wouldn't be allowed on over-the-air TV, it's not allowed on HAM radio spectrum. You can report it, and with evidence it can lead to nasty fines and/or revocation of license.

[monksy]

Yes. There are different people with vastly different values out there.

> Myself and others tried to temper the conversation and return to civility, but they wouldn't have it.

You're feeding into their behavior. IMO We're seeing a huge conflict in culture: one side that is authoritarian against unpleasant language and the other that doesn't accept that (or the suggested changed). (That's a very simplified view of it)

[rsync]

"Yes, and a lot of these folks take a "get off my lawn" approach to anything that's different to how amateur radio has been done for the last 50 years."

... which I don't find surprising and seems to fit, but what I was very surprised by was the tremendous amount of submission, and appeal, to authority that pervades HAM communities.

FCC regulations are not to be questioned. Even to discuss other, possible regulatory regimes or changes to rules is met with incredulity and sometimes outright hostility. God forbid one bring up issues of circumvention, etc.

I find it surprising because it is such a contract to the UNIX/FOSS community which places such a high cultural value on freedom and exploration of the gray areas of systems.

It's an odd cultural aspect of the HAM community ...

[pdabbadabba]

I agree with you that there's absolutely nothing wrong with discussing possible regulatory changes. But it's a different story if what is really going on here is that they want to follow the regs and you want to explore their "gray areas."

In the U.S., the entire HAM community exists at the FCC's pleasure and there are a lot of other interests out there who would be happy to take over their spectrum if the FCC woke up one day and decided it could be more productively used. Poking the FCC in the idea would be a pretty bad move for the community as a whole.

[treeman79]

I got involved with amateur radio ~20 years ago as a teenager Handled radio traffic for various marathons. Was a bunch of 60-70+ people and a few teenagers.

Got briefly involved a few years ago. Still dominated by 60-70+ year olds. Me and a friend in our early 40s were the “kids”

[jumelles]

Yep, and in my experience the older people definitely lean towards the "law and order" and "follow the rules" side of things, which is very disappointing from a "hacker" sort of "question authority" ethos. You'd think the Venn diagram between trendy maker spaces with 18–40 year olds and amateur radio groups would be close to a circle, but there's hardly any overlap at all.

With the improvements and rising affordability of cellular networks, satellites, wifi, IoT protocols, etc. — not to mention to overall transition from analog to digital — will amateur radio even stay relevant?

[tmearnest]

I got a technician license at 16 and joined the local club. I was surprised at how hostile the majority of the members were. Since I didn’t learn code, I couldn’t use the HF bands and talk to people a little more tolerant. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the hobby in general.

[jenkstom]

To be honest, I see this more as a baby boomer thing than a Gen X thing. Gen X who are into technical things tend to be into digital things. I mean hey, give me a commodore 64 hooked up to a modem and I'm gonna have a good time. Other digital modes are all the same to me. I'm Gen X and I'm 50, and I'm gonna whine more about k-pop than digital modes.

[panzagl]

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but no one cares what GenX thinks. Apparently we didn't throw enough temper tantrums as children.

[rib3ye]

It's hard to agree with that line of reason. In my observation, GenX marketed themselves as the generation of apathy, and so eventually people became apathetic about them.

[Cd00d]

I think GenX didn't believe in marketing themselves. The concept makes this X-er chuckle quietly.

[TeMPOraL]

Funny things these "generations" are. It's just as if someone were drawing an arbitrary cutoff line every two decades, picking a random characteristic from the overall zeitgeist, and proclaiming it to define the people of that "generation"...

[dvtrn]

And people buying into the characteristics and tropes with shocking willingness

[samatman]

Boomers marketed GenX as the generation of slack and apathy, because we weren't impressed by their music. Richard Linklater was born in 1960...

We were too young to object at the time, and now we're stuck with it.

[mikece]

> Boomers marketed GenX as the generation of slack and apathy...

And we spend all day on Slack at work so clearly the Amateur Radio version of Slack/IRC has to be called "Apathy"!

[TeMPOraL]

More realistically: people playing with computers in the 80s/90s didn't complain enough about this being considered "nerdy", and now instead of "bicycles for the mind", we're stuck with digital toys designed to the lowest common denominator.

[ponker]

I’m not a ham but I totally agree with the old guard on rejecting digital. MAKING your own equipment is an essential aspect of why amateur radio is worth preserving — it makes the network very resilient. In a world where digital electronics become very hard to acquire, hams can still maintain essential communication by tearing out components from microwaves and landfills. No such chance if everyone’s dependent on RTL-SDR chips from eBay.

If ham radio goes digital then it’s just people wasting spectrum on something they could be doing on the Internet.

[detaro]

Being around after the collapse of civilization is neither the only nor the primary purpose of ham radio, and there's a world of difference between "not rejecting digital tech" and "everyone's dependent on RTL-SDR chips from eBay".