RadioBanter - View Single Post

August 12th 03, 01:45 AM

In article ,
(Brian Kelly) writes:

"Carl R. Stevenson" wrote in message
...
"N2EY" wrote in message
om...

More likely the boom after WWII (and Korea) was due to military
radio folks becoming hams when they got out ...

There has never been a correlation made between the growth of ham
radio and new batches of war vets.

It should be noted that the number of US hams grew from about 60,000 on VJ Day
to almost 100,000 in 1951, when the restructuring that gave us the "name"
classes (including Novice) took place. Some of that was obviously returning
vets, some was "pent up demand", etc.

btw, FCC continued to conduct ham exams and issue amateur operator licenses
during WW2. They simply suspended all station licenses. So there were plenty of
hams but no ham stations for them to operate legally. This was a big
improvement over WW1, when all licenses were revoked, equipment had to be
dismantled and sealed, and even antennas had to be lowered to the ground and
removed.

The far more likely reasons were
the overall increase in the standard of living and more personal
leisure time aided and abetted by a heightened awareness of radio
comms and technology in general after those wars.

All big factors. Something as simple as a VA or FHA mortgage and a bunch of
Liberty bonds made a big difference.

And to a lesser
extent the availability of surplus mil-spec hardware for cents per
pound was a boon to growth.

Sure. Plus wartime manufacturing advances meant that prices on both parts and
manufactured gear went down compared to inflation.

More younger people joined the hobby for
all these reasons plus the availability of the then-new Novice license
was a big shot in the arm for growth. "I wuz one" . . .

The Novice had the effect of drastically reducing the age of the average
newcomer. Some folks back then were not happy about that.

The boom in the 60's was probably due to the emergence of economical
JA radios,

There was no boom in the '60s. JA radios did not really appear until the mid
'70s.

That growth occurred when brands like (bloody expensive!) Drake,
Collins, Hammarlund, Heath, B&W and the rest were the only games in
town.

Yep - the '40s, 50s and very early '60s.

a general increase in the interest in electronics, and later, the
emergence of VHF/UHF FM and repeaters ...

'70s, not '60s. Driven by cheap surplus land-mobile stuff.

HF equipment suppliers were and still are almost entirely driven by
market needs and expectations and the competition to meet those needs
and expectations per buck per performace capability. The availability
of the HF riceboxes in the '70s did just that for the existing
population of hams. I've never known of an example of anybody getting
into ham radio simply because the newer HF equipment provided more
bang for the buck.

Actually, what really has a big effect is the perceived cost to get started. In
the bad old days most hams started out with a receiver and simple wire antenna,
costing whatever they could afford. For many it was a $10 Command set or $25
used SWL rx or homebrew. Once the license was earned, a simple tx and TR system
was added. Not state of the art even for the times but a lot of fun was had and
the expenditures were modest and spread out in time. Most of all, beginners had
lots of examples of simple inexpensive first stations. And there was a long
road of improvements possible, all spread out in time.

Today the "paradigm" seems to be a new transceiver, manufactured antenna, etc.,
all at considerable cost up-front before even any listening is done.

Equipment availability for the bands above HF was never been much of a
driver in growth until the Tech license was converted from being an
experimenters ticket to a communicators ticket and even then there
wasn't all that much growth. It wasn't until the 1980s that Techs got
into packet in a big way and into the FM voice infrastructures because
of the increasingly inexpensive VHF/UHF riceboxes that the they became
major players in the growth equation. It was the Disincentive
Licensing maneuver of '91 and the availabilty of $150 2M FM xcvrs
which really done the deed. So now we have numbers. What else did we
get out of that one?

I dunno that we even got that much in the way of numbers. Sure, a lot of hams
started out as post-1991 Techs, and we've grown considerably since then. But
look at the '80s growth, and the '70s growth....

Actually, it's not a bad idea to use existing PC capabilities to do the
signal processing for multiple modes ... it's all software ... and within
the limits of a typical SSB radio, you can do some interesting, albeit
rather slow, stuff on HF.

There ya go again dammit. It's gonna STAY that way too until YOU
figger out how to pull it off without screwing up the bands by being a
spectrum hog for your own jollies.

9600 is a kludge in virtually all of the rice-boxes ... and it's not fast
enough to really be interesting or all that useful ...

9600 would have helped ten years ago but it never happened. In the
meanwhile packet and the Internet have been interlaced and the need
for 9600 has all but disappeared.

I would respectfully disagree ... the idea that "hams can't work
with SMT" is bogus ...

I agree!

Then YOU snip the frigging resistors and jumpers in this frigging SMT
radio so that I can get on 60M. Ya need a 10X magnifier just the SEE
the things on the frigging PCB!

All part of the tool kit.

Building a radio will involve components ... some may be "store-bought"
ICs, others will be R/L/C, perhaps some discrete transistors, etc. ... BUT
there is no reason that reasonably technically-inclined, intelligent hams
cannot
"build" their own custom ICs at home these days ... there are all sorts of
programmable logic devices, ranging from a few thousand or less gates to
several millions of gates ... and the software to do design, simulation,
verification,
and programming is either affordable, or in some cases free.

You do your conceptual design, code it in VHDL, simulate it, synthesize it
into a file that is used to program the IC and voila, something that had NO
"personalilty" ... no "idea of how to do anything" ... is now a functional
"custom IC." This is REALLY cool stuff ... and there are lots and lots of
free "cores"out there for all sorts of things ... SPI interfaces,
microcontrollers,
FEC, and on and on and on ... all things that can be "hooked up" together
and/or with your own code and synthesized into your own IC ...

Let's see,

What I'm hearing is that it's "reasonable" to expect hams who are not
electrical engineering professionals to
do a "conceptual design, code it in VHDL, simulate it, synthesize it into a
file that is used to
program the IC" and then integrate it. We can also expect them to use "lots and
lots of
free "cores"out there for all sorts of things ... SPI interfaces,
microcontrollers,
FEC, and on and on and on ... all things that can be "hooked up" together
and/or with your own code and synthesized into your own IC"s. And then put it
all together into
a functioning, useful RADIO - on their own time and with their own money and
tools.

But it is not "reasonable" to expect them to learn enough Morse code to pass
Element 1. OK, fine.

And when it's all said and done the average ham won't learn or know
any more than he/she needs to pass the tests and/or to get on the air
and meet their specific operating objectives. Whatever takes the least
effort and brain pain prevails.

btw, I don't see anyhting on Shannon's work in the question pools.

Fred is working on it . . .

Actually I think a "21st century Novice" license isn't such a bad idea. The
problem is on the other end of the scale.

Folks just need to think in new paradigms ... unfortunately, that does not
seem to be the strong suit of many present hams.

Another "bell the cat" problem. Which new paradigms? The real problems most
hams, particularly new ones, face are
things like CC&Rs, and RFI.

I heard exactly that same lament in the 1950s and it was just as true
then as it now. What conclusions do you draw from that as it relates
to the health, welfare and growth of ham radio?

What matters is not how many hams there are but how many active hams there are.
The FCC database sez 687,000 or so in the USA alone. What do you think the
bands would sound like if even 10% of them were on the air at once?

73 de Jim, N2EY