Normally, when I post a video, I post several of them. This one, however, I think is important enough to post on its own. Kamal Singh (M0IOV) gave this presentation—The Future and Growth of Amateur Radio—at the RSGB Convention in October 2019. I’ve been meaning to post and comment on it ever since I found out about it several months ago.
His premise is that once amateur radio was relevant, visible, and appealing, but that we are no longer. He blames this, not on the coming of the internet, but instead the third Industrial Revolution. With the coming of the third Industrial Revolution, the complexity of electronics and the electronics industry increased, and that most of amateur radio failed to keep pace with these changes and that we lost our technical edge.
As far as being relevant, he notes that amateur radio used to be a gateway to a technical career, but not so much today. Because amateur radio technology has taken a different path than electronics technology in general, getting an amateur radio license isn’t as advantageous as it used to be.
We also lost our advantage, he says, in being able to provide worldwide communications. He points to the instantaneous communications now provided by the likes of Zoom and Skype. We really have nothing similar to offer.
In addition to losing our technical edge, we’ve also lost visibility. We used to be able to point to a number of leaders and celebrities that were amateur radio enthusiasts. These included Senator Barry Goldwater, TV newscaster Walter Cronkite, and King Hussein of Jordan. Today, however, it’s a real struggle to come up with similar names that might draw people to amateur radio.
Relevance is our Achilles Heel
Relevance, according to Singh, is the biggest issue. Here’s a slide he used to make his point:
Our choice is to continue along the path we’ve been traveling and become even more isolated and detached from the mainstream, or choosing to be more integrated, connected and industry-friendly.
He went on to suggest ways to suggest ways for amateur radio to be more relevant. Singh notes that we are on the verge of the fourth industrial revolution, and that this revolution will be more connected than ever before—and isn’t making connections what radio is all about?
Here’s what he’s talking about:
These applications, he says, are completely dependent on radio and asks, “Aren’t we the radio guys?” Our challenge is to break out of our narrow niche thinking about what amateur radio is and what we do, and to become integrated with the national efforts to develop and integrate these technologies.
He doesn’t pooh-pooh the difficulty of doing this. This is going to be hard, but what choice do we have? One suggestion he has is to launch an innovation challenge, focused on solving a real-world problem. Here’s a slide that talks about some of the things that amateur radio will have to do to make this effort successful:
This is really a great video, and I’m sorry that I didn’t watch it and comment on it sooner. I think he’s spot on with this presentation. I’ve said something similar in the past, when I’ve recommended that the ARRL participate in more professional communications conferences. How can amateur radio keep up if we don’t participate?
As I was watching this video, my wife was at her computer in our shared home office. Towards the end of the video, she said, “This doesn’t sound like amateur radio.” I almost leapt out of my seat. “That’s exactly the point,” I replied. We have to start thinking in new ways and do new things if we’re going to stay relevant. That doesn’t mean we can’t still ragchew on the CW bands, but that we have to start working on the future, too. Let’s start talking about this.
John T Haworth says
When presenting Amateur Radio at Astronomy at the Beach in Island Lake, the most common comment was “My Dad/Grandpa was big into that”. The area of most interest was speaking with the ISS and listening to satellites. The RaspberryPi projects our club members work on also had some power to generate interest. Virtually no interest in standard HF/UHF/VHF type communications, including ft8. I have found the same within my company. What the speaker mentioned resonates with that experience.
David Edenfield W8RIT says
I haven’t watched the video yet, but I’d right off the bat disagree and say that amateur radio is certainly relevant, in a few different ways. I do see MANY avenues of approach that amateur radio and your career can be joined in some ways to improve yourself. I don’t think that we can argue against amateur radio being relevant to society, we certainly are! Take for example a very recent story on the ARRL where hams designed and created ventilators given to Florida hospitals. We still experiment with cutting edge technology incorporated into amateur radio…and I envision much more of it as IoT becomes more prevalent.
Dan KB6NU says
Watch the video, then tell me again what you think.
Ron K0IDT says
Interesting presentation. The comments at the end are worth listening to, in particular
the one from the RSGB VHF manager (sorry missed his call), “amateur radio is not a service provider”.
Now if we can get our national organization to shift from membership drives (goofy FCC initiatives) and the “relay” service provider mentality to something similar to the RSGB presentation we might actually gain some relevance. Right now we’re pretty irrelevant,
one word covers it very well, Starlink, which is scheduled to go live in a few months.
Cheap portable ground stations, gigabyte access anywhere in the world, and ease of use
makes for another nail in the amateur radio relevance coffin.
ADC says
Hi,
I’m an radio amateur from Italy and I got my license about ten years ago. From the first moments I understood that become a mere radio-gear user represented a dead end for my soul and for the whole ham radio community. Now I’m into antenna building and CW learning; one can say that today devoting energies into telegraphy is useless, particularly in relation with the proposed effort to go back to being useful to the modern society.
But we must also ask ourselves what mean to be useful. Chasing commercial logics may be profitable in the short term, but we “never” be able to compete with the actual technologies and in the long run it can be a lost race.
Everyday I ask myself how ham radio distinguishes itself from the communication technologies used every day by people. Sure you can talk more easily with all the world by using Apps, but you’re totally dependent on a network that you don’t own and probably you also don’t understand.
Anyway, ham radio is not (just) for talking, otherwise we’d be dead already (look at the Citizen Band.)
So I think that today we need not only to innovate, but also to preserve knowledge, techniques and procedures that may be lifeline during dark times and that ultimately relate to understanding world and elevating our human nature.
I’m also into amateur astronomy since I was a kid, and I find a lot of similarities with the ham radio world. I manage two amateur astronomical observatories and as a club we run a lot of outreach activities: we still see an excellent public attendance, but it is really, really hard to catch more young blood in the hobby. It seems to me that a lot of young people are distracted by a lot of other things, unable or unwilling to dedicate time (and money) to a discipline.
I need to say that light pollution is more and more stealing us the vision of the night sky, and if you can’t see it you can’t ask yourself about it, and probably you will not study it. Maybe ham radio, and all the scientific hobbies, are suffering from similar processes.
It is clear that I don’t have clear asnwer to the issue, I just put some cards on the table and I look forward to hearing your your thought.
73!
Scotty (K3TLC) says
I agree in a lot of ways with the video and you Dan. We fight to be relevant, but we also fight to be known amid the public consciousness. If they don’t know we exist, there’s really no relevance discussion, period. To help remedy that, I make sure my family, friends, and coworkers know I’m an amateur radio operator, I try to demonstrate my activity and interests when posting to FaceBook, I encourage as much public awareness as possible when we have foxhunts, Field Day, and the uber-important Kids’ Field Day. As soon as I was licensed, my grandkids were handed HTs and had to go to the nearby school with Pop-Pop on a “bunny hunt”, and we nicknamed our little group “The Bunny Rescue Squad”. I even invented a game that young people could use at Field Day that would keep them from wandering all around the national park our ARC used. I can’t really speak to the relevance discussion of the RSBG recording (but do agree in principle), but am working my hardest to ensure amateur radio doesn’t fall into obsolescence because the public isn’t even aware we’re there.
Brent Boydston, KF5THB says
First off Dan thank you for posting such a insightful and challenging article. In my own little way I have been championing the need for relevancy or currency for a little while. Ham radios’ complete and total silence as a community service, during the current pandemic would be my exhibit “A”. I hesitate saying this out loud for fear of sounding like Frank Burns from MASH but “Soon this war will be over..”
Mr. Singh makes some good observations but I think he has them just a little out of order. That is to say the relevance of ham radio rested on the simple fact that it was, at one time, the only way for the common citizen to directly engage in worldwide communication. I believe everything else comes from that relevance. Yes it provided a springboard into a technical career but it merely shortened the path. It provided a cadre of radio experienced and trained workers/soldiers. VoTech training would have replaced us earlier. The fact that we have no more celebrities or royalty involved in Ham radio is merely a symptom of it’s losing its relevance. There are those like myself, who were interested in the hobby in the 60’s & 70’s but were thwarted by the CW requirement. Our numbers are dwindling too, as a source of new members.
I’m afraid the best we could hope for, which might be more than enough, is simply to be a bunch of capable and helpful guys and gals who play with radios. We could take on a pet project so speak; most all of your major community service organizations have their own. The Kiwanis has the elimination of iodine dependent health problems such as gout. The Lions Club has there Eye Bank and the Rotarians I believe is for swapping kids around the world. But I could be wrong. By listing these groups I’m not saying they’re doing great or that they are not having their own challenges maintaining relevance but if you need a corneal tissue transplant the Lions Club is making that possible. So what does that leave for ham radio? Well if we weren’t so snarky, crabby, argumentative, elitist and all around unfriendly, we could be just a great social organization. We could bring our radios and eat ice cream, hamburgers, and have other summertime activities. We seem to have a real problem being friendly so we need to be more than just hospitable. Mr. Singh suggested that we align ourselves with some world wide IR4 based problem. I have a hard time imagining how a group with such diverse ham radio interests can rally around such an issue for its resolution. Inventing some new universally relevant and open source codec would put “Ham Radio” in the forefront at least temporarily. I don’t see this as the new long term relevance. To me, we should adopt a cause. It doesn’t need to be a problem which actually touches everyone. The cause would need to be a real issue which has the possibility of affecting everyone. I am of the opinion that “Radio” doesn’t need to be the solution but if its resolution is made more efficiently or quickly, that is enough. (Just like storm-spotting can be done by cell phone or semaphore, using ham radio makes it a ham radio thing) Do I have a proposal? Yes, but I am sure that there are others and probably better. Here’s mine: Amber/Silver Alert Nets. Ham Radio Operator’s take an active role in responding to the hundreds of missing children and wandering seniors who names appear daily across the internet. We’d need to have rules to keep everyone as safe as possible and there will be the naysayers who flock to any new idea like flies to spilled milk. Still, there is no “down side” to searching for the missing and exploited. No one else is doing it. There is rarely an organized response to these. Mostly it is just “keep an eye out for a tan ford with an impossible to remember license plate. Every time 15-20 hams activate to put the word out and relay new information about a missing child, it would be newsworthy; it would be something which no one else is “bothering” to do. It would be a real thing not just “planning” for some event. [I think we already have a ghoulish image from appearing to gleam at the prospect of world collapse] No waiting around for the TSHTF, as they said. On the other hand, we could struggle to be in the public eye for hosting a group of school kids as they talk to the last remaining astronauts or bounce signals off the glitter from a unicorn’s fart. But I think, it would still be nice to be truly relevant. 73! Brent
Mark S. Crabtree says
It is nearly always always proper to engage in activities “for the greater good.” In other words, it would be great if our ham radio hobby were indeed relevant to other technologies, career development, and the betterment of mankind. Actually, I think it is still relevant to such things. But I also believe that it is perfectly proper to engage sometimes in activities that are meaningful primarily to oneself. It is okay to be “selfish” occasionally. We see this in many hobbies, from coin and stamp collecting, to art collecting, to acquiring and refurbishing old automobiles, to shooting guns and hunting, to bird watching, and even to traveling. I simply enjoy the basics of ham radio in the same way. I enjoy designing my own antennas and feeding system. I enjoy figuring out how to get the maximum amount of power to my antenna. I enjoy talking with like-minded hams, and also ragchewing about sundry topics. I like studying propagation and optimizing my contacts accordingly. I enjoy assembling a reliable station, and knowing that if I need to get in touch with someone, I can. None of my hobby aspirations are related to career development, the development of new technologies, the furthering of digital communications or another new digital mode, the IoT, robotics, the control of drones or other UVs, or space communications. My hobby efforts are independent of such things, and are related solely to me being me. What I do is enormously satisfying to me. Ham radio is a means of relaxing, of getting away from the hustle and bustle of today’s world, where everything has to be accomplished according to someone else’s schedule. When I work on my own ham radio projects, I work at my schedule, not someone else’s. If I want to try something “crazy,” I do. When I am lost in my own little world of ham radio, I don’t care at all about relevance, as long I can find other hams to talk with, by using the station I have created. I know people will argue that my perspective is detrimental to ham radio, and is a major cause of its envisioned demise. But I know many other hams who feel somewhat similarly to what I have described, and there are many more who will continue to press on with their efforts to assure amateur radio’s relevance to newer advanced technologies. My impression is that both groups will keep amateur radio alive for the foreseeable future. I hope so anyway.