Reflections on a Radio Club

A few weeks ago, I decided I really should support one of my local ham radio clubs, and attend a meeting.

Partly, this was guilt-induced over the fact one of the club's members helped one of my children learn the Foundation syllabus.  It was also the feeling that, if we all didn't make an effort to attend, there wouldn't be a club, and the hobby would suffer.

I have to be straightforward and say that I didn't like many of the people that attended.  A more-than-typical proportion of the club were super-morbidly obese, and one wondered whether they ever got up from behind their radios of a day. 

JT65 you say?  Pah!  We never had any use for that in my day.  Bla, bla, bla...

But for the most part, the club was made up of those who had not only retired but were well into their sunset years.  The whole thing felt superficially like an evening event at an old people's care home.

Inevitably, there was more than a hint of stubbornness amongst some of the members.  The kind of stubbornness that comes with having been part of the furniture for decades, finding comfort in the unchanging, and the gradual loss of one's ability to cope with the real world. 

Also lurking in the background were those obsessives who make up the contesting brigade.  Everything except marking endless callsigns in a contest log is meaningless to the contester.  So I didn't even bother talking to them (they were, anyway, not interested in talking.)

Someone produced a rig - the kind of rig stubborn old men like to espouse as the 'best thing ever made'.  In this club's case, that was a 30+ year old transceiver that filled a desk - but that nobody could figure out how to get sound into headphones from!  Nobody bothered using it, anyway.

Whilst there were some very capable CW operators amongst the crowd, none of them seemed to have taken up any of the plethora digital modes that now dominate many of the bands. This is another generational thing, because computers hitched to rigs appeal to younger hams.  It's too much like newfangled technology to the elders.

Regrettably, after only two attendances, I found the whole thing highly unattractive.  It's easy to see why youngsters and females wouldn't even contemplate throwing themselves amongst that kind of crowd.

When I say I'm an amateur radio operators to those who have never really come across such a thing before, they invariably look a bit lost and then blurt out something meaningless about 'CB radio'.  They also have a pretty anoraky view of us all, a view that this club only very strongly reinforced.

I've come to thinking that committee-structured clubs, whatever the hobby, are an anachronism and belong to the distant past. Petty committee politics are always playing around in the background somewhere, and people today simply have no interest in it.  They can do their own thing, learning from the web, without those politics and patronising attitudes.  I dare say that is a good thing, actually.