This discussion reminds me of how the parable, The Blind Men and an Elephant, fits our sacred hobby to a "T":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant We are all "right" in a narrow sense but we are all "wrong" because our view points are so skewed by our perception of truth. We are each just "bloviating" when we hold forth on the subject. Have any of us ever tried to poll younger non-related and non-ham persons in a structured way? Probably not. Do we really understand: What "they" know/don't know about technical hobbies? What "they" know about amateur radio? Why it might be interesting or uninteresting to "them"? I don't think so. I have tried (unscientifically) to ask these questions of younger folk I interact with professionally without identifying myself as being "an older geek". I can't begin to categorize the answers because they are so varied. Introspectively, what I do see is one generation of an old civic (mostly men's) club in a panic because we perceive we are all dying off and there will be no one to "carry on". Our cohort is blind (well, maybe just really myopic) and are incapable of clearly seeing the whole truth... amateur radio is a very diverse but extremely niche hobby, it does not belong to a single interest group - not techies, talkies, first responders, contesters, physicists, space frontiersmen, or preppers. An awfully large group of people look at "us" as odd or funny old dudes... The media has never helped us much... Herman Munster? Come on. Mike Baxter? Really??? Ham radio is just a TV prop and usually used to poke fun at certain attitudes. OTOH the actual high value stuff we occasionally do is all too often relegated to 11pm local news as "filler" if it is reported at all. Who failed? Not even worth pointing fingers... we did. Embrace it, have fun with the hobby, chill, let the marketing departments at "IKY" and "China-Inc" figure out the sales pitch. We geeks will still be here in the future and some will be hams... and we'll line up for the latest widgets. Let's move on. 73 All, "Weird Uncle Jack" KD4IZ Jack Spitznagel FM19oo ______________________________________________________________ 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
