"Dave Heil" wrote:

The idea of communicating without a landline phone being involved? The
thought of being active in public service communications? The interest in
DXing? Tinkering with circuits or antennas? Being able to modify
commercially built equipment to make it better? Setting up and operating
a fast scan TV station on one's own? Being able to stay in touch with
local buddies who are also radio amateurs?

None of this draws people to ham radio these days (in large numbers, I'm
sure there are always exceptions and there are some people who join the
amateur ranks for the reasons you list.) In reality I do not disagree with
anything you have posted in your followup message.

All one has to do is view the licensing stats at Speroni's site to see the
future of ham radio.

Amateur radio licensees peaked in 04/03 at 687,860 -- exactly 12 years (10
years + 2 years grace period) after the introduction of the Tech license,
which illustrates all the no-code Tech license did for ham radio was stall
the inevitable negative slope in licensing statistics we see today.

In the past 43 months, Amateur radio has lost 31,000 licensees. In the 43
months preceeding that high point, Amateur Radio added 11,919. Thus, we are
losing amateurs at 2.5 times the rate we added them in just the same period
before.


I do not believe that elimination of the code test will reverse this trend,
because:

a) I do not believe the code test represented a significant barrier to entry
for many people (post 2000) looking for HF privileges. At 5WPM the cost test
did little more than to test the applicant's ability to rote memorize a
table of dits and dahs, and perform a mental table lookup. For this reason,
I do not feel there is this huge untapped reservior of people waiting in the
wings to get a ham license, as there were when the code test was eliminated
for VHF. I'm sure there are *some* people, I simply do not feel it is a
statistically significant amount.

b) I do not feel the "problem" with ham radio is the code test, or geezer
operators bitchin' on the air about non-coded operators. For reasons that
clearly we can debate for eons, the younger generations that I work and
interact with on a daily basis simply are not interested in ham radio the
way folks 20+ years ago were. My 8 and 12 year olds would rather play XBOX
than sit around learning radio theory. EE/CS students I work with are
thinking "consumer electronics", not "old fogey HF radios".


We can get together in 2010 and see if there were any meaningful bump in
license stats as a result of this change. I'm sticking with my original
predictions in my original reply to Steve's posting

73
KH6HZ