IARU: more crap

IARU Region 1 seems to have been busy of late with what it describes as taking control of the future of amateur radio, rather than being controlled by the future.

This is a very good idea. But I'm not sure IARU has carried it off.  Indeed, the outcome of this exercise, which involved a large number of member societies, seems to end-up repeating the same old rubbish that we've heard coming from the mouths of rich, retired white people for decades.

Consider, for example, this sentence:

"Amateur radio is seen to be providing social, economic, educational, and other benefits to
society"

Well, at an individual level, I suppose there are certainly social and educational benefits.  But to society as a whole?  I'm not so sure.  And who does IARU believe 'sees' radio to be like this?  Certainly not the general public. Using the words 'other benefits' is nebulous, and weak.

If you ask a person in the street, or they come across you whilst out portable, amongst the public, then I can very confidently say that about 95% of them could not tell you a single thing about amateur radio.  Most, feeling pressed to say anything at all, will tend to blurt-out the words 'CB, is it?'  

And there, I think, is the main battlefront for amateur radio: its sheer unknown-ness to the general public.

That's not to say the public aren't interested; I think they very much are.  A lot of retired-age people who come to talk to me when they see me out on the coast will say how much their young grandchildren would enjoy having a go at radio.  They go on to say it would be a lot better than staring at a mobile phone.  Of course, they're absolutely right!

If you don't slap CB down when the public mention it as something they remember from the dim past about radio, then they are much more likely to take longer to talk to you about it.  I often say 'I started off after a period with CB.'  And that was true for very many of us older than about 50 years today.

It's also true that a fair number of people seeing an antenna will try to see what's going on, but won't engage and won't come to ask.  They mumble with one another that it's probably something illegal, or wonder whether the operator has permission to put an antenna up in such a beautiful spot.

This is almost certainly stoked by the idea amongst the public that amateur radio operators are socially withdrawn, 'anorak' types who lock themselves away in man-sheds.  And let's be honest, a lot of us are like that.  We may not be unfriendly, but we can certainly appear to be.  

In the UK, certainly, amateur radio was widely held for decades by participants to set them apart from - and above - the rest of society.  The need to pass a fairly involved, 90 minute, largely electronics-based examination, plus the mystique of knowing Morse code, essential until very recently to get onto the HF bands, made these people, they imagined, 'special'.  

A large fraction of the radio community back then were well-paid career electronics workers who could afford and/or build their ham equipment.  This just reinforced their separation from the general population. These attitudes were quite effective in isolating amateur radio from the general public, who were even seen as unwelcome threats to the hobby when they came to it via the CB route.

IARU goes on, inevitably, to claim that:

"Amateur radio is seen as a welcoming and accessible activity for people of all ages, backgrounds, genders, and ethnicities, providing fun, social community and personal development" 

Well, I had to laugh at that!  Considering that 50% of humanity is female, there are essentially no women in amateur radio.  Ethnic minorities are seriously under-represented in countries like the UK and the US, especially when it comes to positions in radio societies.  I don't think that women and ethnic minorities find amateur radio welcoming at all.  If they did, they would be participating. 

I also found the following rather odd, to the point of surely being wholly false:

"Amateur radio has an extensive media presence from its accessibility to new entrants to its high value technical and scientific contribution".

Does it?  I can only recall one mainstream media article about amateur radio in the past several years.  Even then, where the BBC tried to present a positive image for us, it was entitled 'The very particular world of amateur radio'.  You can still watch it here, and I'll let you sit back, imagine you're a non-amateur radio person, and think: 'is this really painting a good picture of us, or just lightheartedly reinforcing what the public think of us already?'  Or, maybe more usefully: 'will this encourage more people to rush out and join up?'

I'm not at all persuaded that IARU has a strategy that will work for the future. Reading through their list of 'Strategic Objectives', you find that they are not so much aims for the future, but simply statements of how some contributors to the exercise see amateur radio today - or, actually, how it was, a long time ago.  This feeling is only made worse when you look at the flowchart under 'What happens now?', which seems like a recipe for more committees or something.

For my money, I would make these suggestions to IARU:

(1) Recognise that the management of radio societies are typically highly skewed in terms of ethnicity, age, gender and socio-economic security.  They are highly unrepresentative of society as a whole, and unlikely to understand why people not like them are not joining the hobby.  Indeed, they are unlikely to perceive, or reject the case, that there is any problem at all.  The problems begin here.

(2) The perception of amateur radio that matters isn't found from within the existing amateur radio population itself.  Rather, to ensure the future of amateur radio, and to break down the clear, existing barriers to participation, we need to ask the general public what they think of us.  Only then can we find out where the negative impressions of our hobby lie (although many of us can readily tell you this!)

(3) Stop claiming things about amateur radio that have little foundation in reality.  More especially, stop claiming that a reasonable justification for amateur radio's value is found in 'emergency communications'.  Of couse, radio can provide some relief in emergencies.  It's just that, in practice, almost nobody involved in the hobby will ever use radio in this way. I doubt most people who may be interested in joining would want to do so to pretend being some kind of emergency responder in a yellow jacket, anyway.

(4) The claim that amateur radio provides skilled people to industry is almost certainly false inasmuch as it is in any way a good reason to support radio.  We all know that radio is overwhelmingly a hobby of the ageing male population.  Those aren't working-age people of value to industry, although they are by no means without value in terms of teaching others, for example.

(5) Be honest about where we stand.  We're seen as rather odd, highly-technical and anti-social people who hide away in sheds, surrounded by incomprehensible electronic stuff.  We won't appeal to a new generation of enthusiasts unless we tackle these images first.  

There are plenty of other things to tackle, too.  The UK regulator, OFCOM, for example, has next-to-no interest in the amateur service.  A year ago, it imposed complex and wholly needless EM safety regulations in response to panic amongst the ignorant public about 5G internet.  When asked, absolutely nobody, including OFCOM, were able to provide scientific evidence that provided a basis for their imposition of these ridiculous rules.  

There is no point having a strategy for amateur radio when regulators just stamp their feet at random, with no basis for their actions, and seemingly nobody being able to challenge them.