Like many other hams I got into the hobby at a teen but I became discouraged because of RFI complaints. For decades family and work ruled my life. Then, 10 years ago, I discovered in my junk pile an old forgotten low power transmitter from novice days. Happily, it still worked and at 10 watts there was no TVI. Following up on my rekindled interest I visited a local club. The reception was cool and my recounts of radio minimalism brought sneers of elitism from the kilowatter hams. Furthermore, neither they, nor any of the other distance drivable clubs had “Extra class” license training. As one president advised, “We have no classes. No one does. Just learn it on your own.” So I gave up but am still active on what remains of the CW allocation.

Three years ago I polled over 160 high school boys about their hobbies and pass times. I wanted to see where ham radio ranked among 25 other hobbies. The vast majority of them derived the greatest pleasure from just hanging out or sleeping. Ham radio, on average, ranked near the bottom of seemingly interesting hobbies. Actually taking ballet lessons was right next to ham radio, and this was after I had them look at QST and some license study material. Most interesting was that they thought the hobby was too technical. The majority indicated that the greatest obstacle to participation was technical complexity, not learning Morse. Quite a few liked the idea of resourcefully building simple CW rigs as opposed to buying feature filled expensive SSB ones. To me this says that youth might still be fostered into ham radio. HF band access is a start. But clubs, FCC regs, QST, and various magazines need to be more inclusive and have ongoing youth and newcomer features to promote interest and identity.

Times have changed from the 1960’s when incentive licensing and exclusive frequency preserves made sense. Now I wonder if it would be better to replace the current license grade based band and emission allocation scheme with one that is based simply on license grade and power. That is, every class gets the same frequencies but not every class gets the same power. For example, Nov-Techs get 15 watts, Generals get 150 watts, Extras and Advanced get 1.5 KW. Would that encourage newcomers? I expect it would because of the relative ease kids and newcomers would have putting together inexpensive low power CW rigs compared to QRO SSB,FM, etc. ones. Ideas anyone?

Al