It is about 50 years since I first started playing with radio. Driven by a fascination with stories of my grandfather’s crystal sets and the box of old looking components left in his shed. This was in the time of big valve wireless sets and long wire aerials to poles down the garden.
Amateur radio was very different then, most stations were on AM apart from a few who used the new fangled SSB. There were also many on CW which was hard to decipher on the house AM set.
When I did get an AR88D things suddenly improved and I could hear the world. I quickly learned that hams were a friendly bunch and got many offers of surplus equipment and practical help. It was not long before I started building stuff and the sheer excitement and pleasure from gathering components together and making a working receiver is something I will never forget.
So, 50 years on what of today? I could lament the loss of technical skills, complain about the low exam standards, moan about bad operating practices and generally go on about things not being the same as they were. But I still get a kick out of building stuff and operating simple equipment so not much has changed. Or has it?
What really bothers me is that the technical challenge as all but gone. All you need now is a wad of cash to buy everything from the latest SDR rig to the cables to connect it all together. Yes, there are some ops that cannot solder a PL259 plug to a coax cable. Does that matter? Yes and no would be my response.
The demise of technical skills has taken away the thrill of learning and making. That achievement has been replaced by contests, DX chasing, having the biggest and most powerful station and being able to send the fastest Morse!
All of that is a way round the lack of technical achievement and all of it is, in many ways, just superficial fluff that obscures the true meaning of amateur radio i.e. self-training in a technical hobby. And, I believe, it is losing the goodwill to fellow hobbyists in the process as we are all seen to be in competition with each other
Take for example a recent discussion on the FISTS email list. A simple question was asked, ‘do you match the sending speed of another op when replying to a CQ or when someone replies to your CQ’? That used to be just a common courtesy, good manners and generally was within the ‘spirit’ of ham radio. Now, it seems, to even ask the question is an attack on the high speed ops. But why? Perhaps it is the current obsession with winning, contests, DX awards anything which proves you have the better station or are the better op. For many that has taken over from technical achievement as the reason to pursue the hobby.
There is nothing wrong with achievement but when it means trampling on others, ignoring them, getting one over them etc then the hobby has lost an lot of what made it special. Yes, win contests, prove you can send high speed Morse but please never forget that we all rely on the amateur radio community for the very existence of our hobby.
I have completed the Smallwonder SW+ 20, it is now in a diecast box and just needs the controls labelling. There is space for a keyer and the RIT which will come later.
