"Who Are We" - Demographics of US Amateur Radio Licensees

What needs to be discussed is how things can change so that newcomers can feel welcomed and included.

There's a LOT more to be discussed on the subject.

Then start a thread on the subject.

No - because it's completely impractical. The only way to make the question pool "secret" would be for FCC to take over testing, and that's just not going to happen.

No. That went away more than 40 years ago. No way it's coming back.

What I would like to see is changes to the vanity call system. But that's a different issue entirely.

I'm against "cram classes", where they "teach the test" so that newcomers can just pass the test at the end of a 1 day session. I'm against them because the result is all too often newcomers who have licenses but don't really know what they need to know to actually operate an amateur station.

I'm not talking about getting FCC to change things but for amateurs to change what they do.

Maybe in the long run. Such a change will take years at least - heck, it took almost 4 years to get FCC to simply drop the 5 wpm code test when the treaty changed after they'd previously said the ONLY reason they kept the 5 wpm code test was because of the treaty!

We can start RIGHT NOW saying "if you're a newcomer, your best bet is to start with a General rather than a Technician. You get a lot of benefits for a small additional effort. Here's how to do it."

Maybe. Such a change is years away.

The problem NOW is that much of what an amateur needs to know isn't on the tests. And remember, it only takes 74% right to pass. One can have great big gaping holes in one's knowledge and still pass.

Look at some of the questions posed here by folks who supposedly passed the tests....and not just newcomers.....

Again, a long term project - and it does not address the issues brought up by @W5NYV.

Start by listening to what newcomers really want to know.

Partly. Show digital modes other than FT8 in use. Show how CW is still widely used by amateurs. Demonstrate how non-voice modes can be implemented easily. Don't assume everyone just wants to talk.

One more reason for newcomers to start with a General rather than a Technician.[/QUOTE]

 

Then discuss it.

You are acting like I hijacked the thread. A thread that was already quite dead so I thought to focus on a point in the video that wasn't being discussed. Nothing was being discussed so why should I start a new thread when it would start with the same video?

There's no fixing that. If we moved the bar up from Technician to General then we'd just see one day cram classes for that.

And I'm arguing we will not solve the demographic problem until the FCC makes changes. And there's evidence of that from the video.

So your solution to the problem of this taking so long is to discuss it later? Or not at all? Seems to me that if this would take a long time that starting the process should have some urgency.

You can't do that "right now" because people know that General isn't where licensing starts in Amateur radio.

The licensing also leaves a bad first impression. It's a 1940s licensing that needs changes. It leaves the first impression that Amateur radio is stuck in the 1940s, and there's plenty of evidence to show that impression has some truth to it.

Any meaningful change is years away. It would be nice to move on to discussing solutions.

And I proposed solutions to that. I proposed increasing the number of questions on written tests, and to split the testing into an operational skill test and a technical skill test where one would need a passing grade on both to get licensed. What's your solution? "Encourage" newcomers to test for General up front? How can we put any enforcement on that and still be in compliance with FCC rules? Seems to me that we should get the FCC involved, and since this process can drag on we should think up something sooner than later.

I disagree. It makes Amateur radio more attractive to newcomers. It can create new incentives to upgrade where now theres a disincentive. It can do more. I only gave a starting point, we can go into details to what new licensing means. The issue on Technician granting too much too soon was brought up in the video, it was in the Q&A though, not in the initial presentation. That doesn't make it irrelevant, or something that would take"too long" to bother with. It will be difficult to attract newcomers as the Technician privileges get only less relevant to the needs of Amateur radio in the future.

One thing that they want to know is why Technician is prohibited from operating digital modes where it is currently allowed only CW. The answer to that is to give a history lesson on Amateur radio licensing, but that is only half the answer. The question is why this remains today, and there is no good answer for that.

Sure.

I've seen how CW is widely used by Amateurs. In contests we see them operate by computers because tapping out CQ so many times can be tiring.

Kind of hard to do that when Technician is limited to CW on a few HF bands. Oh, right, we are supposed to "encourage" them to go immediately to General. How is that going to work? My guess would be General-in-a-day "cram" classes.

Maybe we should consider a "new Novice" license? Something with low power privileges, some limits on hardware, access to a sampling of bands, but not repeat the mistake of mode limits. Oh, but we do that and it starts to look like a "Foundation" license as used in other nations. Perhaps like the "Basic" license from Canada.

How is that going to work unless we have "cram" classes that teach the material for both exams required for General? We could try to break that up into two or more lessons that cover the material in more depth, and have some demonstrations of the different modes, but you might not be able to keep them coming back. There will be people that will offer "teach to the test" sessions that try to fit everything into one session because that will be what people want.

It would be easier to fit everything into one session if we simplified the privileges and band plan. That way more time can be spent on operational and technical details that matter far more than trying to "incentivize" upgrading with a more complex privileges and band plan.

Why have so many licenses? Why slice and dice the bands like we do? What incentives does that offer today? In the video it was pointed out that there's a lot of room to play above 30 MHz so that creates no real incentive to upgrade. How can we "encourage" people to start at General when more than half of licensed Amateurs are quite happy with Technician? There's a good chance none of their "Elmers" have a license above Technician.

What would "encourage" people to go beyond Technician privileges is to remove that as an option. I say look at Canadian Amateur radio licensing as a model for new licensing here.

I believe we can't fix the demographic problem without fixing the licensing. You believe that there is a need for more "Elmers" spending more time modeling good practices and good behavior, and I agree. There's few people giving an example to upgrade because we've had decades of people stagnating at Technician. One issue raised was not having a good "heat map" on demographics. Well, we should be able to get a good idea on where there's a shortage of people qualified to be a VE. Look at the FCC database and map the license class to location.

 

one aspect of disincentives to upgrade is that the US licencing system restricts frequencies by class rather than power by class

if you look at the UK system where the limitations are mainly power pages 13 -17 (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/62991/amateur-terms.pdf )

Foundation - broadly 10w power at feed point ( unless lower limits apply to all licencees e.g. 136 KHz ) , no GHz bands other than 10GHz, can't build own transmitters

Intermediate - broadly 50 w at the feed point access othe GHz bands

Full - broadly 400w at the feedpoint - access to all bands inc 472KHz and 5MHz

 

Indeed, and I recall that being discussed in the video.

A common complaint in trying to copy a Foundation license in the USA is that a restriction on building transmitters is somehow a violation of the "spirit" of Amateur radio. Well, yes, in a way, but such a restriction does not prevent so many other things that would still be allowed by Part 15 and other parts of FCC rules. Another problem is that a power restriction that low is not compatible with a much larger nation in both area and population. Perhaps but with improvements in technology this restriction is not nearly as restrictive as it would have been in the past.

As I think about how we could make a Foundation license distinct from some analog of Intermediate we come to slicing the privileges so thin that we could end up making the license so restrictive that nobody would want it. That was apparent with Novice in that so few people were getting the license that the FCC did away with it. Why do we need three licenses any way? We risk repeating old mistakes.

One big problem with using UK licensing as a model is making a smooth transition from our current licensing to this model. Having a second tier license with fewer privileges than Technician would be a hard sale. One is how we envision Amateur radio as a means to experiment with building, and that includes transmitters. Requiring Technician to choose among staying put, "upgrading" to some second tier license with fewer privileges, or just leaping straight to Extra, likely means most will continue to stay put. It's the problem of staying put that we are trying to solve.

One solution I pondered is allowing people with Technician to retain their privileges with an upgrade-that-is-not-really-an-upgrade if we took the UK model. That is effectively creating a new license class, much like with what happened with Technician Plus. This creates an enforcement problem that will make it difficult to get FCC to agree to the proposal.

I'm thinking we should instead use Canada as a model and go with two licenses. To avoid Technician, or even Novice, from losing any privileges we consider 200 watts power below 30 MHz and 1500 watts above 30 MHz for the new first tier license. That is perhaps repeating the mistake of too much too soon but I'm finding it hard to resolve this any other way. To avoid the mistake of slicing and dicing bands we allow this new license to operate all modes, all bands. That should not be an issue for any privileges above 30 MHz as that's what Technician is like now. Given the reactions from some licensed Amateurs on proposed changes to HF privileges they'd squeal like stuck pigs at the suggestion. I suspect nearly all of these people would squeal at anything that doesn't maintain the status quo.

I thought of creating a new license for this new first tier set of privileges that now looks so much like General but we run into how to manage the transition again. Do we allow General license holders to "sidegrade" to this new license? I suspect we could allow it because it's not much bigger change in privileges than has been done to General in the past. If we allow it then why not require it? If we require it then why change the name to something new? Then if we do that for General then why not Advanced?

There would be some losses in privileges that go with these additional frequency privileges. The main one being limited to 200 watts below 30 MHz. Should we allow General to be a VE for other people testing to be General? I say no. I suspect that there's a few VEs out there that have not upgraded to Extra, they are just going to have to upgrade to Extra to remain a VE then. Let the squealing commence.

If we allow ourselves to reduce power privileges for General on below 30 MHz then perhaps we can allow it for above 30 MHz as well. I guess, but that means reducing privileges for every licensed Amateur after an "upgrade" except Novice and Extra. Novice loses nothing but that's because they have a bar to clear on that which is so low already, we need only allow 200 watts to clear that and going this long with no issues I'm aware of on safety or interference problems keeping 200 watts sounds good. Extra won't lose out only because there's nothing to upgrade to. Unless someone can come up with evidence of a widespread problem with the current 1500 watt limit above 30 MHz there's no reason to create a disincentive by removing that privilege.

If we force this privilege change on General then maybe force these new General privileges on Advanced too. They will no doubt squeal the loudest. They will lose on power privileges, VE privileges, but gain frequency privileges. If these privileges are important to them then they should upgrade before their renewal into the new privileges.

We can allow Technician to retain some testing credit or require them to take some 70 (possibly more) question test to the new General for an upgrade. I see merits with both options. I would prefer keeping the tests separate with one focusing on operational skill and the other on technical skill but then which is which? One solution is Technician retains no testing credit after the new testing goes into effect. This will need discussion.

One last thing, Novice licenses. I think we should just propose not allowing renewal. It's been long enough and it's fewer than 8000 people, many of which may have gone inactive anyway.

This all may please the FCC quite a bit. It's a sunset of Novice and Advanced. No more Technician, it just gets grandfathered until the FCC doesn't feel like renewing them any more. And General privileges get simplified. Anyone that squeals about this will likely squeal at any changes, and the squeals will likely be quite few.

If you read all that then you win 10,000 internet points TM today. (That's OVER 9000!!)

 

There is a bigger problem than Amateurs not upgrading beyond Technician. Amateurs not interested in learning beyond communicating.

 

Biased statistical sampling error.

Amateur radio encompasses a lot of very different subsets of activity that use amateur licensed RF. Just because someones particular favorite subset is shrinking (maybe hamfests and HF CW ragchewing, et. al.) doesn't mean other subsets aren't growing (digital modes or UHF networking, etc.)

 

Nope: TL;Dr

 

Here's an idea, we try to work on solutions to both problems.

There's a lot of problems and we don't have to work on them one at a time. You can call one problem bigger than the others but I'm seeing the disincentives that crept into so called "incentive" licensing as a problem that needs to be fixed. Perhaps it is not a big problem now but it will only get worse until we do something about it. How about we do something before it gets out of hand?

Most of all, how about we work on more than one solution at a time? I'm not seeing a lot of debate on what the "real" problem is but not much on actually trying to fix the problem.

I don't know what people are thinking of as solutions. Anyone have any ideas? Even a bad idea can get the ball rolling. I have an idea to help with the demographic problem, and the lack of desire to learn beyond communicating problem. How about we all buy an orange safety vest with our callsign on the front and "Ask me about Amateur Radio" on the back. Wear them every day you leave the home. Buy a pair of Baofeng HTs for demonstrations, keep them in the vest pockets. Have a printout of the band plan at the ready, and be prepared to explain why one should skip Technician and go straight to General or Extra using the privileges on the chart as a guide. Here's a question, what are the reasons should give for skipping Technician? Then, with those reasons in mind, why settle for anything less than Extra? Why should someone even apply for a license if they didn't pass all the tests? If one did not pass the test for General but passed the test for Technician should they even bother with applying for the license or operating on the air until they reached General? Why or why not?

 

A lot of the problems in my opinion has to do with this country. If we had more young people interested in engineering and how things work that would help in my opinion. The other aspects I'd venture to guess are "marketing problems."

I see no shortage of talented hams in Europe and abroad. An example is the modern M17 project, where there are talented hams from Poland, Germany, Italy and many other places. Where as what i see here is mostly boring status quo hams interested in doomsday radio, contests and other just mundane operational aspects.

 

I am. But you keep trying to switch away from that subject onto the license structure.

The issue of the US license structure has been discussed MANY times in MANY threads here.

The issues of actual demographics (not just "look around at a club meeting or hamfest") have NOT been discussed much at all.

The issues of newcomers feeling unwelcome has NOT been discussed much at all.

No. Wrong.

If we show that "license in a day" cram classes are a bad thing, they may go away. If we do nothing, they won't.

Nope. Wrong.

No matter what changes FCC makes or doesn't make, the other issues still need to be fixed. But you clearly don't want to discuss them.

See above.

Wrong again. History proves it.

Way back in the 1970s, the Technician began to replace the Novice as the entry license because repeaters were The Big Thing - and with a Tech you got 2 meters and 70 cm., and with a Novice you got neither. So lots of newcomers bypassed Novice and went straight to Technician. This trend increased in 1987 when old Element 3 was split, and grew even more in 1991 when the Technician lost its code test.

The Novice was closed to new issues in 2000 because so many newcomers were bypassing it and going straight to Technician, Tech Plus or higher as their first license.

How?

What REALLY leaves a bad impression is behavior that makes newcomers feel unwelcome and/or second-class.

In the 1940s the ABC system was in place.

If you can't even get the history right.....

I am discussing solutions.

Which requires FCC changes. Good luck with that.

Imagine if newcomers were told "You can start with a Technician, but the General license gives many more privileges, and only requires another written test of 35 questions. There's a lot of overlap in the material on both tests, and you can take both at the same test session for just one fee."

and similar.

No.

The first step to any FCC rules changes is to come up with a proposal and circulate it widely among the amateur community, and get across-the-board support, BEFORE sending to FCC.

If a proposal is sent to FCC without that step, it's almost a guarantee that it will be strongly opposed in the comments and go nowhere. This happens again and again and again.

FCC isn't interested in micromanaging Amateur Radio. We're a legacy service that they're stuck with. We have to make it easy for them to say yes and make changes.

There's also the issue that @W5NYV mentions: Technicians who are VERY happy being Technicians, doing VHF/UHF/microwave stuff exclusively. Not everyone wants to be on HF when there is so much to do on the world above 50 MHz.

It's important go understand the history.

It remains today because no one has come up with a good proposal to change it AND has gotten widespread support for the change BEFORE sending the proposal to FCC.

There's much more to CW than that. MUCH more. But you don't use CW so you don't know.

Your guess is wrong.

[Quote[Maybe we should consider a "new Novice" license? Something with low power privileges, some limits on hardware, access to a sampling of bands, but not repeat the mistake of mode limits. Oh, but we do that and it starts to look like a "Foundation" license as used in other nations. Perhaps like the "Basic" license from Canada.[/quote]

I've described a "Basic" license many times.

How do you know "what people will want"?

Maybe.

And there's a better chance you're completely wrong.

It's more complicated than that.

There's population density, for one thing.

Another is socioeconomic factors such as income, housing, education, and culture.

The video is a starting point, not a conclusion.

 

I'm trying to get the discussion going. So far most of the comments have been a debate on where the "real" problem lies, as opposed to discussing ways to resolve any of those problems. This is a problem with many aspects to it, and so the solution will have to take on those many aspects. We don't even have to agree on the problem to agree on the solution. It appears you agree that the Technician license is redundant, and impacts demographics in Amateur radio, so why be opposed to discussing a new license structure?

Would anyone like to propose solutions so we can move beyond debating what the "real" problem is?

Again, we don't have to agree on the problem to agree on the solution. It's like a bunch of physicians debating over a patient on what the disease could be rather than the far more important issue of treatment for the symptoms.

We don't even have to debate what has to happen first because we can do more than one thing at a time. Seems silly to demand we encourage people to start as General before we can discuss how to convince the FCC to get rid of Technician, a license that we already appear to agree on as being redundant. If successful in getting people to start at General then the FCC would be more easily convinced to get rid of Technician, but we'd also be more successful in getting people to get a General license if we can convince the FCC to change the licensing. Since we can do both at the same time then, again, why be opposed to discussing a new license structure?

 

I was first licensed in 1969-71. I didn't upgrade because I was a teen and had other priorities.
Fast forward to 1990. I was living in Eureka, California and was thinking about getting back on the air. I approached the local club and was told in no uncertain terms "we don't want hippies like you in ham radio, get lost!"
Fast forward to 2018. Two local hams - one an ultra conservative - urged me forward. At my General exam, one of the examiners spent the entire time complaining about how "n****ers and "Sp*cs" are taking over the country. He openly made fun of the Thai name of one of the exam takers, who braved it out anyway, and passed.
The, on to 2020. At my Extra exam, the VEs were true gentlemen, just as friendly and professional as could be.
So I think that while there is a cultural problem in ham radio, it's the usual small percentage who ruin the image of the hobby, just as in life at large. It is a problem when it comes to tearing youth away from their phone-based lives.

 

I remember people talking about "honey-do hams" in the 1990s, not "hippies". The "honey-do hams" were people that would get an Amateur radio license so they could use a phone patch repeater, something of a luxury or novelty at the time as cell phones were still quite expensive. They'd be able to check in with their wives for their "honey-do" list while on the way home from work or out and about running errands. It appeared to me that different groups of Amateurs tolerated this behavior better than others.

If your experience is representative then it appears to be a problem that is being resolved on its own. Americans as a whole no longer tolerate racism and sexism like it did before. I have my doubts this is a problem except in some area clubs. With greater access to clubs online I believe it far easier to find a club and participate now than in the past. Weekly or monthly meetings can be held online and a handful of times per year people can go through that extra effort to meet face to face.

A problem that will not resolve itself is the problem with licensing. It's been brought up again and again that the FCC will not act on licensing until presented with a proposal that has been well thought out, does not violate the vision they hold of what Amateur radio is and does, and has the support of the Amateur radio community. Yet it seems nobody wants to even try fixing a problem they admit exists and has a resolution. If there is a need to act on some other issues besides licensing then we can do more than one thing at a time. I'm seeing in the discussion on what is happening in Ukraine several conversations going on at the same time. Why can't we do that here on the demographic problem? Like in the Ukraine thread we can see these different conversations merge and diverge as solutions to the demographic problem is discussed.

Everyone has input on the problem, so why no input on solutions? Is it because solutions would be hard? If there's no solutions then why keep bringing up the problem? There's the old joke, "Everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it." The weather is not something we can change, but we can change the licensing. It would be hard but it can be done. If this is so hard then why make it harder for anyone else to get changes? The only reason I can think of is they don't actually want it fixed, they complain because it is "fashionable" to do so but they don't want anyone to do anything about it. That's perhaps a different kind of "-ism" that needs to be removed from Amateur radio, and those getting in the way are the "-ists" that are making Amateur radio less welcoming and inclusive.

 

Who says amateurs not upgrading beyond technician is a problem? Really, who? It's on the individual to advance themselves and if they do not wish to do so who is anyone else to say it's a problem? If they are happy, great! If they don't have enough ambition to pursue a small bit of knowledge to take a simple test then the exact purpose of having license classes has been effectively discovered.

 

The problem was mentioned in the video. We are supposed to have "incentive licensing" but it clearly is not. This is not just evident in the small numbers of people upgrading beyond Technician but the small numbers upgrading from any class of license.

If someone wants to claim there is nothing wrong with "incentive licensing" then how would we even know it is working or not? What would "disincentive licensing" look like? One indication of no incentive to upgrade is more than half of those licensed not going beyond the first tier license. If you believe there is no problem with people not upgrading we still have a license structure that was cooked up in the 1940s, put on the books in the 1950s, and since then patched and patched with no real thought on preserving any incentives to upgrade. Also the licensing has been patched with no real thought on if the licensing made sense. The patches made sense because maintaining Morse code testing as it was could not be defended any longer. The removal of Morse code testing should have been only half the solution.

The "incentive" for upgrading was more access to HF. That's not an incentive any more. We see this from how few upgrade to Extra. There's no longer any Morse code testing holding people back. The testing isn't all that difficult, as is mentioned and demonstrated often, so why keep up the lie that we have "incentive licensing" any more? If we don't have "incentive licensing" any more, and we have no desire to maintain any incentives to upgrade, then why any opposition to creating a better match between the testing, privileges, and needs of Amateur radio?

You say a lack of people upgrading is not a problem? Fine, I'll go with that. We still have a problem of the testing being too little for too much. Alternatively or in addition we have a problem of 1940s privileges still existing largely unchanged today. The privileges were, again, cooked up in the 1940s, put on the books in the 1950s, and patched and patched with no real thought on how this would be enforced, or how it might leave a poor first impression on people new to Amateur radio.

I'm seeing a proposal to "encourage" people to upgrade to General. Okay, why? If they don't want it then they don't want it. I'm seeing a clashing of philosophies here. I'm not the only one seeing a problem.

The ARRL made a proposal for another "patch" on the licensing by proposing Technician get more room on HF. The idea was to restore some "incentives" in licensing. Accusations abounded of this being a cave in for Technician license holders demanding more for nothing. The truth is they don't want it, and if we don't get people to want it then someone else could come along and take this spectrum from us. That could be a problem. It also creates even less incentive to upgrade, more testing for less spectrum.

Here's an idea. How about we do something while there is still something to do something about?