daverea.com

If you’ve ever seen the movies Contact or Frequency, or the Simpsons episode entitled Homer’s Paternity Coot, then you’ve had a very small – though rather fictional and in the later case mocking – look at the world of amateur radio. I was 13 years old when I passed the entry-level exam and received my first ham license in the mail. I saved every penny of a summer’s lawn-mowing money to buy a new handheld radio, and by 1996 I had upgraded my license to afford greater priveliges and explore the parts of the radio spectrum that can traverse the world over. A week before my 16th birthday, I begged the local bank manager to let me open a checking account in order to buy a “fox tango” that was older than me, and convinced my parents to let me plant a 25-foot-high aluminum antenna behind our house.

Needless to say, I did not have a girlfriend, but we’ll save that round of soul-searching for another blog entry. Now, as I was saying…

At the time, radio was exciting – I can remember the anticipation of keying up on a repeater for the first time, or delivering my first message via the Western District Net, or the care I put into “dipping the plate and peaking the grid” of the my rig’s tube finals before one of many optimistic – but ultimately futile – “CQs” into the ether. It was communication for communication’s sake, in hopes of hearing a voice respond from halfway around the world, just because we could.

In the decade-and-a-half that’s passed, a lot has changed about the way the world communicates. Autopatches have been replaced by cell phones. A scratchy voice riding the ionosphere to your ear through a giant antenna and a tableful of equipment has been supplanted by a few mouse clicks and a Skype connection. The magic of morse code, for many who might have otherwise experienced it, has taken a back seat to text messages and IM windows. It’s not that I’m complaining or reminiscing; that’s the way the world has gone. I’m just observing.

For lack of a better explanation, “communication for communication’s sake” seems to be a dying breed. Rich, immediate communication has become so interwoven into our lives that it’s now simply a transparent means to some other end. A decade ago, flinging bits around the air at 300 baud through a packet modem was a big deal. Now, you can stream YouTube videos to your cell phone.

Sure, amateur radio has purpose outside of letting the retirees and acne-clad teenagers chat about how they just worked some killer DX into Kreblakistan using a QRP rig made of three potatoes and a chicken-wire antenna. There are plenty of public service clubs, weather spotters and contesting groups. There are teams that willingly and selflessly (and most of the time needlessly) “deploy” to disaster areas to help relay messages in and out when the cell towers are down, the power is out and every above-ground phone line is underwater. But the times when these things happen are few and far-between, and the efforts are often shoddily-executed … and then what’s left is communication for communication’s sake.

It’s actually a bit ironic – because many of the innovations in modern radio communication have come from the minds and basement workshops and secondhand soldering irons of ham operators. So have we been out-innovated? I don’t think so; I think the paradigm has changed. When “communication” – moving information from one place to another, whether it be spoken words, bits of data or morse code dots and dashes – became the channel for doing bigger things instead of a thing to do, ham radio quietly stepped aside. The “channel” became transparent. Remarkably few people care about the 1900MHz QPSK modulation that brings that YouTube video to their cell phone; they just care that they can laugh at someone’s cat doing a backflip during their subway ride home.

When I was 13, ham radio changed how I interacted with a small and very welcoming slice of the world. With a radio and a few calls of “KB2YQE listening”, I made new friends and found myself at club picnics chomping noodle salad. Today, it’s MySpace and Facebook bringing people together, sometimes constructively, sometimes not so much.

So what’s a disgruntled ham to do?

In my opinion, it comes down to innovation – specifically, innovating our way back into actually having a purpose. I think that Amateur Radio needs a reason for being beyond communicating for communication’s sake. It needs to become the channel for something bigger, something with a wide appeal, something impossible to achieve without its ham radio underpinnings.

I know there are at least a few hams who find their way to – even … dare I say? … frequent – this site, so I’m interested in the weigh-in on this one. What can the ham radio world do to move into the 21st century? Are we a dying breed, or do you think the world of amateur radio is fine as it is? If it is ambling (or whacking, or mowing, or just scooting) toward extinction, what can we do about it?