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Suggestions For a Healthier Club
http://www.arrl.org/news.features/2007/03/05/1
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Please read the article bellow and remember.
It Was Always There
By Eric P. Nichols, KL7AJ
President, Arctic ARC
At a recent Arctic Amateur Radio Club board meeting, during a rare
lull in the oft-heated discussions about how best to increase our
membership, I threw out a simple question.
"How did you get into ham radio?"
The responses were revealing, to say the least. One by one, our
board members, some young, some old, told the story of how they got
into this hobby of all hobbies. One gentleman had a father who was a
ham, and more or less forced him into the hobby, for which he was
unspeakably grateful...years later, of course. One XYL saw a
shortwave radio at a friend's house, started twiddling knobs, and got
frustrated that she could only listen. For her, the rest was
history. A couple of others were exposed to amateur radio in high
school, one in Boy Scouts. Another credited me with getting him into
ham radio, much to my gratification. One other confessed that he
didn't really know; it just seemed to him that ham radio was "always
around."
Interestingly enough, not one of the hams entered the hobby because
of a concentrated recruitment program. Although occasional public
relations "Blitzkriegs" have their place in Amateur Radio, I'm not
sure they produce lasting hams. Like many other clubs, we manage to
get a lot of hams licensed, but the dropout rate is appalling. The
vast majority of our newly licensed hams never get on the air.
I don't think our message is flawed; I think it's our delivery. Of
all the board members I mentioned above, I believe the last fellow,
the one who said ham radio was "always around" had the key. We need
to get back to the place where amateur radio is a continual, if
quiet, presence. People who get lured into the hobby, stick with the
hobby. People who get coerced and cajoled into the hobby leave as
soon as we aren't looking.
The fact is, most new hams never see a working ham shack, about all
they see is a handheld, which isn't all that fascinating. When a
young person sees a ham shack equipped to cover everything from DC to
daylight, they take notice...it doesn't matter whether they're a geek
or not. I've never seen anyone who wasn't impressed by a Moon bounce
(Earth-Moon-Earth contact) array swinging around on its
rotators...whether they had a clue what it was or not!
People don't know about ham radio because they don't see ham
radio...except, perhaps at Field Day.
The best place to cultivate that "always around" feeling is in the
schools. We need to infiltrate the middle and high schools again.
Notice, I said, again. There was a time, not too long ago, when it
was difficult to find a high school without a club station. Field
Day should be a three hundred and sixty five day a year event, and
that is easier to achieve in the schools than anywhere else.
There is no better way to teach science than with ham radio. We need
to remind our public (and private) school teachers and administrators
of that. We need to let our students get their hands grubby making
things happen, rather than merely watching things happen. We need to
get some real hardware into the schools. We have wonderful new
allocations now, and the technology to use them is cheaper and easier
than ever. When I was in high school in the late 60s, it was
everything one could do, and then some, to do Moon bounce. It was
only because we had a lunatic (no pun intended) electronics teacher,
that we were able to pull off such a stunt. Now, Moon bounce is
practically within reach of any determined high school club station.
Wouldn't it be great if Moon bounce stations proliferated at our high
schools the way H.F. stations once did?
Of course, I only use Moon bounce as one radical example. We have
exciting things happening down at 500 kHz, as well. What better way
to learn weak signal, digital signal processing techniques than with
our newly allocated MF experimental spectrum?
This all may be rocket science, but it doesn't take rocket science to
get it into the schools! Our teachers want to see us excel in the
sciences. Let's give them the tools to do so.
Fifty years from now, someone may be asked how they got into ham
radio. It would be nice if they could answer, "I don't know...I
guess it was always there."
******
Eric P. Nichols was born in 1954 in what is now Silicon Valley. As
Eric describes it, his exposure to physics research came at an early
age, having grown up "down the barrel of the Stanford Linear
Accelerator." In 1976 he felt the call of the wild and abandoned a
fledgling engineering career to move to Alaska and live life "with
the bark still on." As it turned his call to the wild kept him in
engineering as he spent a twenty year career as Chief Engineer for
KJNP, a 50,000 watt radio station in North Pole, Alaska. Afterwards,
Eric became a development engineer for HIPAS observatory, an aurora
research facility near Fairbanks operated by UCLA. The experience
set the stage for his first novel, Plasma Dreams, published in 2004.
ISBN 9781413748260
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N6KRV 
