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Old 05-23-2010, 03:57 AM
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Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
<----Zenith C845
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Fairport Harbor, Ohio (near Lake Erie)
Posts: 4,035
Quote:
Originally Posted by AUdubon5425 View Post
It's a shame - every hamfest I've attended seems to be composed of about 85% senior citizens. Most folks I've found to be pretty friendly. Free time is the biggest reason I never looked further into becoming a ham; I really wonder what some of the hamfests are going to look like 5-10 years from now when a good chunk of these folks are gone.
Ten years from now, many of today's amateurs will be in their fifties, sixties and older, so these are the people you, I and everyone else will see at most hamfests (and hear on the air) by that time. Amateur radio is not lacking for participants at this time (there are over 640,000 licensed amateurs in the US), but there don't seem to be as many licensed hams these days as there once were. The reason for that is, in large part, the Internet and online chat rooms; many younger folks today would rather chat online than over the airwaves.

I don't see this killing amateur radio any time soon, but I do see it cutting into the number of new hams licensed every year. The FCC has dropped the Morse code requirement for every class of license, but the written test is still difficult to pass without studying for it beforehand; the passing grade is 74 percent, which means seven or more correct answers out of ten (assuming a ten-question test; most written amateur license examinations, however, have far more questions, but the passing mark is the same). The problem is that many younger people today are not interested in technical fields such as electronics. They may have an interest in computers, but quite a few teenagers and younger kids use their Windows 7 computers just to play games; they could not care less about the nuts and bolts of computers or the Internet, as long as the systems work.

If you should get the chance to listen in on the ham radio bands, don't let the old-school "one by three" call signs you will hear every now and then fool you. These callsigns, known as 1x3 due to their format (W#xxx/K#xxx, where # is the call area numeral and xxx is the callsign suffix) were originally assigned to amateurs in the 1930s through the fifties; at the time, their holders were, by and large, younger folks who are now senior citizens in their 80s, deceased (silent keys in amateur radio lingo), or former amateurs who have let their licenses expire. The FCC has made these old callsigns available for reassignment under the "vanity" callsign program, which was implemented several years ago so, more often than not, if you hear a 1x3 callsign on the bands today, there is no telling how old the holder may be -- he or she could be sixty years old or more or just a 17-year-old or younger kid. The chances are, however, that most of the time when you hear a 1x3 callsign these days, the holder will be quite young. The Extra class one-by-two calls are mostly all available for reassignment under the vanity callsign program these days, as most if not all the amateurs who originally held these callsigns 50 years ago or more are almost certainly silent keys by now. This means that, if you hear a 1x2 (e. g. W#xx/K#xx) callsign on the HF amateur bands today, the odds are in your favor that the holder is probably much younger than 50 years of age.

Vanity callsigns are nice to have, if you want a callsign that has your initials as the suffix, for example, or if, for whatever reason, you don't like the callsign the FCC assigned you on a new license. But they come at a price: The last I checked, the fee for a vanity callsign was $13.30. Once assigned, these callsigns are normally valid for ten years or until your license expires, whichever comes first. I personally do not have and do not want a vanity callsign; my WB8NHV call is my first one after upgrading from Novice, dating to my Technician days in the mid '70s and continuing to the present day. I have made probably thousands of contacts under this callsign and my Novice one (WN8NHV) combined over the last nearly 38 years; the fellows in my local club (the Lake County, Ohio Amateur Radio Association) know me by the General callsign, and I see no reason to change it at this late date.
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Jeff, WB8NHV

Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002

Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.

Last edited by Jeffhs; 05-23-2010 at 04:01 AM.
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