The trade off that I see is that we either have a few (very few) new entrants who are highly motivated and likely to continue with amateur radio for a lifetime, or we have many new entrants, with a relatively simple entrance requirement, but only a few will stay with it. But a lot more, than you would have had with just a few entrants.
Our public policy for many years, has been to take the second approach. If we had stayed with FCC examining sites requiring the 150 mile travel radius, the 5 wpm for Technician and 13 wpm CW tests for General, the requirement for drawing diagrams of circuits, and having no question pool but having to really know the material in order to pass the test, I honestly believe that at best we would have 10% as many new entrants as we now have. This would not replace the number leaving amateur radio due to lack of interest, time contraints, and most likely becoming SK. The reason that I believe this to be a reasonable estimate is that I am very hard pressed to come up with more than a handful of hams that I have known over the years who would have jumped through all the hoops that we had up until about 1980. My wife and daughter certainly would not have done it. Not even the slightest chance. Same thing for most others. So if we want amateur radio to continue, we really have no choice to try and attract enough people so that a few will stay with it for the long term. If we did not do that, and continued to lose the many, many technical folks that we have lost for years now, we would see a precipitous decline in ham numbers (and political clout) now that the first wave of the 10 year licenses has ended. As it is we are seeing a decline right now. I don't see this turning around much, if any, but if we can at least hold our own that would be helpful. I am expecting a substantial number of hams moving toward getting their General class license. Since they will rarely be using CW, they will mostly be using voice. But when they discover how easy it is to work weaker signals on PSK31, Olivia, MFSK16, etc., I am hopeful that we can expect an increase in digital operators. 73, Rick, KV9U larry allen wrote: >Hi Danny.. >The problem we are having is that most of our new hams don't seem to get >on the air... >We have more hams now than ever before yet our bands are quieter than they >have ever been, since the 60's at least.... >Larry ve3fxq > > >
