Back to basics

Nov 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Donny Jackson

Before the advent of Internet chat rooms, amateur radio — or ham radio — provided a way to communicate with kindred spirits in other parts of the country. Before voice-over-IP applications let users talk worldwide for little or no money, amateur radio was the cost-effective method to talk overseas on a regular basis. Before cellular technology became commonplace, portable amateur radio units were the only way to make phone calls from a car.

As the amateur-radio community celebrates 100 years of voice over radio (see timeline), ham enthusiasts happily recount their first encounters with the technology and what attracted them to it — typically as excited teenagers.

“To me, when I was a high-school kid in the mid ‘60s, I would come home from school and turn on the radio and talk to Bulgaria,” said David Sumner, CEO of American Radio Relay League, or ARRL, the national association of amateur radio. “This was back in the days of the Iron Curtain, and it was a pretty neat thing to be able to do that.”

But most hams are not teens anymore. The Baby Boomers who represent the core of the amateur-radio community are aging, and the median age of hams today is 50 to 55, by most accounts — a fact that is increasingly evident to attendees of the large ham-radio convention conducted annually in Dayton, Ohio.

“My biggest concern when I go there is getting run over by those three-wheeled carts,” said Stan Reubenstein of the Radio Club of America (RCA).

Attracting more youngsters to ham radio is a goal of the RCA and ARRL, but the task is easier said than done. Cell phones and Internet-connected computers are readily available, and even some video games enable VoIP communication with a competitor halfway around the world. Having to pass a licensing test to communicate via ham radio is not nearly as attractive as these instant-gratification alternatives that can be found in multiple retail outlets, said Don Root, who is leading an amateur-radio task force for the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO).

“Cell phones are readily available, and they can talk to their friends, so why should they study and learn technology and operating procedures to go out and get a ham radio?” Root said. “I don't see that there's a strong draw there.”