Lamenting the decline of the hobby.

Foundations of Amateur Radio

During the week I received an email from a fellow amateur who described that they were feeling deeply disturbed by the decline of the core knowledge underlying the education and certification of today's new amateurs. This is a topic I've covered previously and some of what I'm about to say will touch on things I've said before.

I come from a long background in information technology. My first introduction was around the Motorola 6502 processor in the early 1980's. At that time a computer with 5 kilobytes of memory was a big deal. I learnt to harness every byte and nurture every bit. I learnt machine-code, BASIC, Pascal and Modula-2, which went on to form the basis of my current profession.

The reason I raise this is because there are many parallels in the evolution of amateur radio and the evolution of information technology.

For many years I lamented the dumbing down of the skill-set associated with newly fledged computer graduates. In a nut-shell, hand-coded would always beat Java. I held that view for a long time, until it occurred to me that in the big picture it didn't matter.

Let me elaborate before you start jumping up and down.

In computing, every two or so years, everything doubles, speed, memory, bandwidth, etc. The price pretty-much stays the same.

This means that the inefficiencies introduced by "high-level" languages like Java result in very little in the way of performance loss, but in return the actual process of writing new software accelerates. This means that you end up with more functionality, quicker, at the cost of less efficient code. That's a pretty reasonable trade-off.

If that example doesn't speak to you, it's the difference between rolling out turf from the back of a truck to construct a new golf course and teeing off in days, compared to spending a week planting grass, from seed, nurturing it and waiting at least two months until you might consider playing a round.

Does a golfer care if was rolled turf or planted seed?

A similar thing is happening in our hobby. The advent of Software Defined Radio creates a new category of experimentation. The component count is reduced by several orders of magnitude, in return for functionality built by way of software and maths.

Of course that means that the new amateur of today has no idea in the operation of a valve and only limited understanding of a transistor, but in return they can create new modes such as WSPR, JT65, CODEC2 and the massive evolution of other digital experiments, and they can do that with tools unheard of 5 years ago, let alone 50 years ago.

I am an example of an amateur who knows of the existence of a valve and I have a rudimentary understanding of how it works. I am seriously considering building my own Software Defined Radio, from scratch.

I understand that this might not be something that comes easy and may even be seen as detrimental to the hobby, but I dare say that the introduction of the valve to a spark-gap operator caused the same experience, let alone the introduction of the transistor, the integrated circuit or the explosion of cheap single on chip systems that can be had for cents in the dollar.

The essentials still remain. For example, right now I'm working on an antenna. It involves sourcing nuts that seem to be made from unobtainium, even though they are completely standard in our community and have been for longer than I've been alive.

The self-learning of our hobby, the exploration, the investigation, the curiosity will endure. What we're going to be playing with tomorrow is not going to be anything like what we were doing yesterday, and I'm OK with that.

That our hobby is changing is unmistakable. That's true for every human endeavour ever. I don't agree that there is a decline, nor do I think we've lost more than we've gained. I think the future of our hobby, our community and our pursuits is strong and bright.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB