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 The Curmudgeon, having been licensed in the Amateur Radio Service for more than fifty years, has had a long-standing desire to attend the nation’s premiere annual ARS convention, the Dayton Hamvention. However many small, niggling practical matters, such as employment, family, and funding have always created road blocks. Now in full retirement and well along [...] The recent series of posts dealing, in part, with the future of the Amateur Radio Service launched the Curmudgeon’s thinking into a new direction. Being a “philosopher dude” kind of guy whose thoughts tend to move toward larger and more futuristic issues, the Curmudgeon generalized his thinking to consider the future prospects for the entire [...] In this final part of the series, the Curmudgeon looks backwards (with just a little nostalgia) at the ARS of fifty years ago as a reference point for today’s Service and notes that, even then, it was not a perfect society. And he gazes into a well-clouded crystal ball and hazards a few guesses about its future. [...] In the previous post, the Curmudgeon looked at the first of the two major sociological changes that, in his opinion, have occurred in the Amateur Radio Service during the past fifty years: the “dumbing down” and “consumerization” of the ARS. In this post he examines the second major change. This other change, the Curmudgeon suggests, is the ascendency of ARS operators’ ego as a principal organizing force. It has changed the Service during the past half-century, and not for the better. There are several ways in which this trend manifests itself today. [...] It’s not been the Curmudgeon’s intention to devote appreciable coverage to the Amateur Radio Service (ARS) in these blog postings. A majority (perhaps most) of today’s telecommunications professionals are no longer licensed hams, although in past decades they most likely would have been. However, two recent personal events again brought the ARS into focus. In the first, earlier this year the Curmudgeon (today an Amateur Extra Class licensee) celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of earning his first ARS license, which was the (former entry-level) Novice class ticket. The second event was receipt of a gift of some computer CD-ROMS containing sets of page image files for the historic 1930 through 1959 issues of QST Magazine (the principal ham journal, published by the American Radio Relay League). [...] |
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