Welcome to Amateur Radio! You'll need £5099, though...

This week, my eleven year-old daughter received her much-awaited Foundation Licence certificate from the RSGB.

The certificate is nicely done, and one has then to apply for a callsign via the much-criticised UK regulator, OFCOM.

Sadly for my daughter, and the ham radio contigent in general, OFCOM's online licensing system flatly refused to work properly.  A swift phone call revealed other complaints about the same problem.  A day later, it's still not working.  Big disappointment for anyone, let alone a child.

Alongside the certificate from the RSGB comes a 15-page leaflet - 'Radio Today' (bizarrely, priced at £1.95, even though, like RadCom, it doesn't appear to actually be on sale anywhere) - that aims to help newcomers set up their first station.  It's a dismally dull read, lost the interest of my daughter in seconds (I didn't last much longer), and is full of the usual adverts for wildly expensive equipment.

Indeed, it seems to be mainly driven by adverts, as all magazines are.  The front and back cover feature a rig costing over £5000.  For just an extra £995, you can currently buy a brand new Dacia car!

Why does the RSGB choose this £5100 rig for an introductory text for new hams?  Image: AB4BJ.

The leaflet's 'how to set up' article uses not a second hand unit from e-bay as an example station, but a £1200-odd rig, together with a £250 desk mic and proprietary PSU and speaker.  At least three of those things can be aquired for a fraction of the proprietary vendor's prices, and the rig could be at least half the price for any normal user.  My own boom microphone set-up cost me £11 for the Behringer mike, and £10 for the boom.  Spending £500 more would not make any practical difference.

So, an adverts-driven leaflet that makes ham radio look utterly elitist and unaffordable, especially to those youngsters who haven't a cat's chance in hell of affording an education, house or pension, let alone finding the spare cash for a 'flagship' transceiver.

The RSGB, dominated by ageing middle class, white men, needs to quickly drag itself into the real world of operators flooded by electronics-generated QRM, postage stamp-sized gardens, a regulator that doesn't regulate, and an overwhelming antagonsim towards our hobby.