On 2015-04-01 23:42:26 +0000, Channel Jumper said:

City Data.com thought enough of amateur radio to include statistic's for
licensed amateurs per a community, per a county.
There is 177 Amateur radio licenses in my county, although I am not
quite sure how many are living or dead.
I know there is 17 actively licensed amateurs in my county, or 1 in 10.
There is 44,764 people living in my county.
Or .00037% of everyone living in my county is a licensed amateur.

I bet even less are licensed pilots. This does not reduce the amount
of fun they have with their hobby.

Out of those 177 amateur radio licenses, I am the only person that
checks into the regional and statewide ARES and RACES nets.

Most hams aren't whackers and we have little to no interest in ARES and
RACES. It's a fun hobby, not a public service no matter what the ARRL
and FCC say.

There is approximately 7 people out of those 17 people that are actively
engaged in amateur radio activities that actually operates on HF -
Field Days. You can boil that number down even further, to 5 if you
want to count the number of contester
s that actively participates in one or more contests per a year. Reduce
that number even further to 3 if you wanted to find someone that
operates on 3 or more contests a year. One guy only participates on the
Phone Traffic net - because they all act like they are still on the CB
radio and he is attracted to that.

Most hams do not participate in contests. Many of us see them as
silly, and they are a haven for poor operators who have no problem
interfering with ongoing QSOs or out-of-segment operation in improper
modes.

If there was a real emergency in my county, you could probably muster 5
licensed amateurs, which was as many as we had the last time we did a
S.E.T. Out of those 5, you could probably find two or possibly 3 that
has a station that could be operated both HF and FM remotely - from a
location different from the place where they live!

Why wouldn't you want your radio to be with you at the emergency
command shelter or other staging area? Radios are small enough these
days. Just grab it and take it with you.

There has been 2 VE Test Sessions in my county in the past 10 years.
One session was put on personally by me, of which I got zero
participation in my license class. Only two people appeared for the
free license exam, and only one of those people passed their exam. He
has been licensed now for 3 years and refuses to upgrade to General or
buy good equipment or get on the HF beyond what he can do with his CB
radio antenna and his 25 watt Uniden Mobile 10 meter radio and his
Technician class license.
The Uniden and CB radio antenna was given to him - although they were
broke and he had to pay a CB radio shop to fix the radio, and I repaired
the antenna for him!

So what? Do you have a bunch of half-broken abused HF rigs that you
want to pawn off on him for a couple hundred bucks each? This seems
like a popular vocation among older hams - take a new ham and sell him
your broken radio.

What do you do with a county that probably has 4,000 people employed by
the Natural Gas Exploration and Production companies that has CB radio
antenna's on their vehicles. Along with another 4,000 people that are
either directly or indirectly employed in the trucking industry and or
are volunteer firemen that also has two way radio antenna's either on
their homes or their personal vehicles?

People who talk on the radio all day long, but only use it as a tool to
support their business, are probably not interested in the radio hobby.
If they were they'd be hams already.

The answer is recruit!

Good luck except:

The problem is - the mental capacity of those people is very low.

With this attitude you're not going to attract many people.

Most of them barely graduated from high school and has little or no post
secondary education.. They read at or below the 4th grade level.

The Tech test is written specifically so that grade-school children can
pass it on their first try. It's just a formality to keep the rif-raff
off the airwaves.

If you give the license away - they will gladly take it!

Why even bother with a license then? People have started to realize
this themselves though - hunters and off-roaders now frequently use 2,
6, and 10m equipment illegally, and many licensed hams operate without
ever IDing themselves, and the FCC doesn't give a damn.

But if you try to teach them how to operate properly or try to get them
to stop talking like truckers and drilling rig roughnecks, they will
just get mad at you and walk away.

Who cares how they talk? Believe it or not the first amendment doesn't
go away for radio amateurs. The FCC's rules for obscenity and such
only apply to commercial broadcasters. As long as they ID and don't
intentionally interfere, who cares what they talk like?

Most of the poor operation I hear is by licensed amateurs during contests.

If you insist that they buy anything or do anything they will get mad at
you.

Who cares then? If they are content to hang out on 2m or 10m and talk
away, that's fine. If they never touch a key in their life they'll be
like most of the hams out there, like the hundreds of thousands who
passed their 5wpm but then immediately stopped using the code.

These people are not electronic technicians or involved in any way in
communications.

This doesn't matter. Those who are interested in radio will get their
license and participate in the radio hobby in any way that they wish,
no matter what you think about it.

You need to face the facts that amateur radio is dying and you cannot
save it by opening the gate and letting everyone in - which is what the
FCC and the ARRL has done.

Year on year it is increasing and people are developing new digital
modes, digital voice modes, operating QRP or QRO, and doing literally
everything they were doing 10, 20, 50, or 100 years ago and more.

The only reason the FCC has not taken more bandwidth away from us is
because of the ARRL.

The ARRL is now an advertisement seller and a contest operator, with
only a fraction of their time or budget spent lobbying the FCC.

The only reason why the FCC hasn't given up on the license requirement
is because the rest of the world will not allow it!

This would mark the first time that a US Federal agency has ever done,
or not done, something because the rest of the world doesn't like it.

So they give these stupid multiple guess question exams where even a
simpleton - 6 years old can pass, and they give out licenses, in the
hope that someone will want to do more than use it like a telephone...

They don't "give" out licenses, there is a formality in the test and
this serves its purpose.

In my county any reply on the radio is followed by the next operator
saying EYE Rodger.

Why is this surprising? Many people in the radio hobby probably first
were exposed to two-way radios in the form of the CB.

Two counties over - they just continually say Rodger, Rodger, Rodger.

Around here the licensed amateurs, old guys who brag about how they had
to learn the code (and who never operate CW) usually just talk over
each other without a break or an ID. Some of the more clever ones have
figured out how to turn on the CW auto-id.

I actually got to the point today where I broke in on the repeater and
said - That's a Big 10-4! After about 3 times, the operators stopped
and started talking gibberish about that they could hear someone trying
to break in there, but their audio was low and their signal was broken
up.

You got so mad listening to a repeater that you decided to go ahead and
interfere with another amateur contact in order to complain about what
they were saying? LOL. I'm surprised they acknowledged you at all,
even if they heard you.

But they were also saying that I was walking all over their signal..

Well they knew they had a jammer on their hands. Hopefully they DF you
and kick your ass.

Typical CB radio garbage!

Spin the dial old man.

So why do they do it? Because they never had an Elmer, and no one is
brave enough to stand up to them and tell them that what they are doing
is wrong! When you stand up to them and tell them that they are
operating improperly, they get mad, they throw a fit, they ban you from
their clubs, and they stop talking to you - not that it is a bad thing,
but that being ostracized isn't s good way to be popular.

You have quite the set of balls to complain about improper operation
after admitting to it yourself just above.

In the end they will gang up on you and make your life so miserable that
you will just go away. Regardless if you are wrong or right, majority
rules, and as long as we keep licensing CB'rs , that is all that we are
going to have.

Who cares? There's always going to be enough space for me to operate
CW and PSK-31 on the HF bands, even if I have to sneak in between
contest stations with their memory bleeping out their call every 2
seconds.

If the ARRL and the FCC would grow some balls and start reprimanding
these people for operating improperly, it would probably stop.
But then they wouldn't be popular either...
The ARRL makes a substantial amount of money by selling advertising.
The advertising is dependent upon the customers tastes.

The ARRL has a good thing going, selling ads to contesters, and the FCC
is run by industry insiders like all the other federal agencies. Why
would they bother policing the ham bands?

What does the customer want?
Since 65% of all amateurs are just Technician Class operators, most of
them do not want a HF radio unless it has a bunch of bright flashing
lights and funky screens - like their CB radios. Most of them are
content with just a handheld radio - $40.00 and talking on their local
FM repeater.

Yep, because most radio amateurs probably got into it so they could
integrate more reliable or longer-range communications into their other
hobbies. There's nothing wrong with this.

Occasionally one of them retires and they want to impress the other
Indian's so they go out and buy an ICOM 7600 or ICOM 7700 - blue
screens, or a FLEX Radio, expensive price tag and lot's of bling!
To compliment that they need an Alpha or a Ameritron ALS 1500 - legal
limit amplifier, or a SteppIR antenna and a big tower.

Most of the people who end up with those big expensive rigs have no
idea how to use them, it's true. The most skilled operators I have met
are all at least part-time QRPers who mainly operate CW on HF. I don't
know many who have one of the $5000+ rigs, excepting Elecraft customers
who all seem to be at least halfway decent hams.

The poor ones buys Kenwood TS 2000, Icom 746 Pro, or a Icom / Yaesu /
Kenwood mobile HF radio...

Those are all decent radios that fulfill every need for most hams.

This is all we got and this is all that we are ever going to have..

Don't worry, grandpa. Soon you'll be dead and you won't have to worry
about those damned no-code kids and their inability to appreciate your
spark-gap set.

You can't teach them anything, their mouths are always open, like they
know the answer, and their minds are closed!
The only thing you can do is say F-uck em and walk away!

Maybe they just don't need your bull****?

I think Gareth that you p=issed off most of the people on here, and the
one time you actually made a good post, no one was here to read it. If
you keep thinking like I do - you are probably going to end up talking
to yourself.

It's not that anybody is ****ed off, it's that Usenet is low traffic
and half the people who know what it is are trolls. It, like ham
radio, is again growing in popularity but you probably won't like that
either.