I've been following the various political debates this election year,
and the whole $700 billion bailout mess. How it happened, how to fix
it, who is to blame, etc. From all that, it seems to me that we're
looking at some pretty lean economic times ahead.

But this isn't really a post about politics or economics. It's about
their effect on ham radio, specifically, growth in our numbers.
Looking back of the history of US ham radio, it seems to me that the
worst economic times were the best for US ham radio growth.

Consider that:

In the 1920s, the number of licensed US hams grew very slowly, if at
all, despite the new technologies of tubes and short waves. By 1929
there were only about 18,000 licensed US amateurs, not much more than
in 1920. The Roaring '20s radio boom was in broadcasting, whose
development has many parallels to that of the internet in the '90s and
'00s.

Then in 1929 came two major changes for US hams. First were the "1929
regulations" that greatly narrowed the US ham bands and required much
cleaner signals than before. A lot of existing transmitters had to be
extensively modified if not completely rebuilt to meet the new rules,
and hams on bands like 40 and 20 were crowded into much less spectrum
than before. (In those days the ham bands were far fewer than today,
and simply getting a transmitter to work well on one band was a
challenge). For example, 40 was reduced in width from 1000 kHz to 300,
20 was reduced from 2000 kHz to 400.

Later in 1929 the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.
Hard times lasted all through the 1930s. There was also the Dust Bowl
that displaced large numbers of Americans from their farms. (May we
never see such hard times again!)

Yet from 1929 to 1937 the number of licensed US hams almost tripled.
In percentage terms it was the time of the greatest growth US amateur
radio has ever seen.

As prosperity began to return in the late 1930s, the growth slowed
down. WW2 shut down US amateur radio for the first half of the 1940s.
When the war ended, there was rapid growth despite all the disruption
of the war, plus rising prices and shortages in the postwar economy as
wage and price controls were removed. Of course a big part of that
growth was from people who had put off becoming hams during the war,
and later from the restructuring of 1951 that created the Novice
license. But in the five years from VJ Day to the beginning of 1951,
the number of US hams almost doubled, passing 100,000 in the process.

The 1960s were good economic times, yet through that decade US amateur
radio growth was almost nil, similar to the 1920s. The radio boom in
the 1960s was in cb, not amateur radio.

Then in 1968 the new "incentive licensing" regulations came into
effect, and in the 1970s problems of inflation, high interest rates,
unemployment, energy crises and lack of economic growth hit the US
economy very hard. Just look at gasoline prices - less than a quarter
a gallon for cheap gas in 1969, a dollar and a half ten years later.
It wasn't until the mid-1980s that things really stabilized.

Yet all through the 1970s and into the 1980s the number of US hams
grew steadily, from about 270,000 in 1969 to about twice that number
in the mid-1980s.

Since the early 1990s until today, we've had (at best) slow growth in
the number of US hams, and (at worst) a decline, even though the price
of a ham rig in inflation-adjusted dollars has decreased greatly and
the licenses are far easier to earn. The boom in these years has been
in "wireless" (an old term reused!) rather than amateur radio.

The only exception to the pattern of hard times = ham radio growth I
can find is the 1950s, which were economic good times (at least the
later 1950s). In that decade the growth of the late 1940s continued
steadily, so that by the early 1960s there were about 250,000 licensed
US hams. Besides the then-new Novice license, the 1950s were a time
when there was lots of WW2 surplus radio gear available at bargain
prices. It was also the heyday of inexpensive but decent quality kit
rigs from Heath, Johnson, Eico and others. The highest sunspot peak in
recorded history happened in 1958, and the Cold War caused a lot of
interest in civil defense communications by hams.

Perhaps the connection is that, in hard economic times, people's
recreation shifts away from going out, traveling, and making big
purchases, and changes to things they can do hunkered down at home for
a little money and a lot of ingenuity. Certainly most of the ham
stations of the 1930s fit that description. While new ham gear and a
big station are expensive, a small homebrew or used-equipment station
with a simple antenna can provide very good results if used with
skill, patience and there are decent conditions.

What do others think? Could we be in for another time of growth for US
ham radio? The Dow is down, house prices are down, credit is tight and
taxes are just about guaranteed to rise. But sunspots are on the
way....

73 de Jim, N2EY