I was caught off guard by Wayne's post. What was he trying to say? Was he trying to say why the K3 is going away and now we have the K4's? Maybe. It's prettier and more likely to attract the younger crowd based on looks? Could be, but that price? Nope.
I got interested in ham radio when a friend in the 7th grade got his license...or maybe it was 8th grade. I thought it was "cool" that he was talking with stations in other states that were not next door to our state (NJ). One day, my mom drove me over and I caught him working DX (Europe). Wow. That did it for me. It was like magic. And Morse code, difficult as it may have been to learn, was another aspect of the magic. After my General class came in the mail, I swore off CW. Good bye forever. I spent the first couple years working DX, building up my totals (on mostly SSB, but even AM back then. I still remember working ZD3E on 10m AM). But pretty quickly (relative term), I ran out of stuff to work. Where was all the "good" DX? On CW! So back I went...and loaded up my log with "good" DX, especially the deep Asian Soviet states. I just loved their CW tone (not clean). And one day, I happened to run into a DX contest. This was like a year's worth of DXing rolled up into 1 day (I didn't know the contest ran for 48 hours). It was heaven. And that started me on contesting. I agree with the comments that contesting is growing. It is! See, for example, https://cqww.com/stats.htm What happened in the 21st century? Nobody knows for sure, but it was big (at least for contesting). I also agree with the comment that not everybody contests for the entire contest. Hardly! See https://cqww.com/blog/operating-time-for-single-operator-entries/ This is a bit dated, but since I am the one who does this calculation, I can tell you that i continues even today. Most guy give out points...not trying to win. Most entrants (not participants, but actual entrants) only operate a total of 15 hours or less. That's like 3 hours in the morning and 4 hours in evening on Sat and Sun. Not much really. But for today's active kids, who has time to devote to contesting when they can be gaming? Most gaming is completed in short bursts of time. Same with social media. With contesting, well, you gotta wait until it's over at 2359z Sunday. And then it takes a long time to get anything close to real results. Long time = weeks to get the raw scores (which is a GIANT improvement over the old days). Now a real marketing question. Does it matter if the newbies to ham radio are teenagers? So what if the newbies are all "new retirees?" I don't know if that is true, but for me, inflow is inflow. I know lots of guys my age who wanted to be a ham when they were my age when I got my license, but didn't, but now still do and are....finally getting their ticket. AND, they have more $$ to spend than some 13 year old (like I and my friend were when we got interested). How does "age of entry" = maintenance of the population? Whatever. Enough rambling, cuz that's all I have to say. I have the next 2 weeks off from work and I'm catching up on "other" radio stuff, like this reflector. de Doug KR2Q ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com