Less and less people are getting Ham licenses due to the internet. They took away the morse code requirement out of the ham test to make it easier. But people still aren't signing up. They like chatting on the internet instead I guess.
I know a ham that's been licensed for forty years. He never wanted to learn the code so he was a Tech all that time. After they removed it as a requirement he started learning it and now he likes CW !! I wonder if there aren't some traders that are like that with TA......
You are right about that. My daughter now 13 has her license but it pretty hard to compete with the internet and her cell phone. She sends and receives texts all day long but when I try to put a mic in her hand she gets shy. We still sometimes use 2 meter simplex to do some local talking. I let her play with psk 31 for a while but she was just too impatient to do the necessary antenna tuning. The digital portion of the band was a bit far from my tuned antenna lengths. I even tryed to talk her into starting a ham radio club at school and told her that it might be a good way to meet boys. "forget it dad" It sounds like some hams are trying to get a ham radio based texting system up and running but that wont attract any new blood into the hobby. I think having ham radio as part of some science classes would be a good idea. My daughter has used ham radio as part of some of her school projects (wave lengths etc) but I think the only people who understood what the heck she was talking about were the teachers. I did bring my hand held into one of her classes during a NASA mission so they could listen to the space shuttle feeds, they liked that. Even got one of the janitors excited about ham radio. The nice thing is once you have your ticket you are good to go so maybe while she is in college her school might have a radio club and she can make some use of her privelages. I think that for me playing with CB radios as a kid was the spark. I was really facinated with the propigation that was always hot on 11 meters. I later played with the freebands but having all the bands 2- 160 meters was what I wanted so I went for me general ticket. Who knows? Maybe someone will read this post and want to find out more about the hobby. Good tading trading and ham station photo link below