Change: can the RSGB adapt?

Although it's hardly high-profile at the moment, there's an on-going discussion about the RSGB over on Twitter.

For the most part, it's well-mannered, with only the occasional mindless defender of the society throwing that old cliche around: 'it's easy to snipe from the sidelines'.

What I get from Twitter, which tends to be participation by younger operators, who may or may not be RSGB members, is that there is not such a 'Leave/Remain' polarity such as you tend to find with older operators, spurred-on by the fixity of mind that comes with old age for many. It might come for me, of course. But I hope not, and I hope someone will point it out if it ever does!

Or is it?

 

Does the RSGB have a future?  In short: not in its current guise. It doesn't seem to understand - and I hope it isn't because it doesn't care - that we are no longer in the '£10 passage' days of Empire, where you could literally have your passage to colonise other countries paid for by the government.  

When you got there, work a'plenty awaited in order to stamp Britain's presence through development on any land unfortunate enough to see it land there. A great life usually followed, at least for white people, and this helped spread amateur radio across the globe; wherever the Brits, Germans, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese have been, there will be healthy ham radio operator numbers.

If that's too esoteric for you, let's look at how the environment for younger people has changed over recent decades, and how these impact on their ability to enjoy radio:

(1) Good, well-paid jobs are much more difficult to find than they used to be. We are no longer rebuilding Britain after a world war, and all the mass-employment opportunities that brings.  Real-terms salaries have stagnated since the financial crash of 2010, and remain below the 2008 peak. A cost-of-living crisis threatens immediately to make things a lot worse.  Paying of the debt incurred by Covid, equivalent to fighting a regional war, means the UK Government is already, again, talking of a 'smaller state', i.e. more 'austerity' that was so damaging from 2010 onwards.

(2) Housing is in a total state of crisis. Most people now retired will have seen house price-to-earnings ratio hover around the 3:1 level during their working lives. Today, it is around 10:1. Mortgages are no longer given away like sweets, and the loan-to-value available is often much lower than historically was the case. Even saving for a deposit, which is around £27,000 for a 10% downpayment on an average UK home now, seems almost insurmountable for many.

This can have both a positive and negative effect effect on ham radio. If you can't afford a home, then you might decide to spend your income on a good /p or /m set-up, or set-one up in your parents' home (the median age of first-time buyers is now 34 years in the UK - it was only 28 years in 2007, and 23 years in 1960). Alternatively, you may well not bother with radio at all, being perceived as something to do when you're settled in your own home and/or later in life.

(3) Planning environment. Neighbours have always loved to complain. But today, they can do so anonymously (so far as the person complained about is concerned) and quickly, via e-mail, to their local council. Intolerance of difference is on the rise, and people's access to large gardens that can actually accommodate antennas is lower than it used to be. Whilst neighbours have every right to influence the decision-making process about someone who wants to install an antenna of any note, the reality is that this, coupled to ignorance of technical matters amongst planning staff, makes gaining permission far too difficult and prone to pub-talk prejudice. At the moment, anything over 76cm is not permitted without consent. 

(4) RFI. This has increased dramatically in recent years and, coupled to a regulator with little interest in pursuing matters, means we either have to put up with bands spoiled by solar PV, car chargers, USB chargers, plasma TVs, etc, or else just go /p or /m.

Now, if you buy a smart phone, or a TV, or a commercial radio receiver, you plug it in and expect it to work with no funny lines across the screen, or interference on the channel you're listening to. And that is exactly what we generally get. As mass consumers, we wouldn't tolerate spending that much money and not getting perfect performance.

Not so with amateur radio. If you spend a typical £1300 on a transceiver you can expect to be blighted by RFI that you can do absolutely nothing about. Install anything other than the most stealthy of wires, and you can expect a visit from your local planning department.

So my basic argument for the future of a truly representative RSGB is that it should, indeed must, start confronting these harsh realities.  It can't change the economy, but it can change planning laws and RFI control.

The median age of those at Board level in the society is now 70 years. We can guess, and probably be not too wildly amiss, that they will tend to be quite well-off, and have a nice house, some in places where antennas can be erected without much trouble. The problem is that without diversity, you can come to believe that everyone else is living like this, and has the same opportunities. But they don't. Clinging on to this belief can then translate into elitism - something that amateur radio has always suffered from, but must ditch.

And recently, the Royal family has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. To younger generations, who don't have that automatic deference to their supposed 'betters', the Royal family is of dwindling relevance. As poor people get poorer, it becomes increasingly harder to sustain the idea that one family should have it all, and that God said it should be so!  

Yet, the RSGB is making a lot of effort this week in pushing the Queen's silver jubilee year through a special 'Q' suffix to the usual RSL (i.e. MQ1CFN). It's a lot of pazzaz, but of very little impact on anything other than royal supporters' minds (usually older people, like the Board who might dream these things up).

OK, so I ramble on again! Some of these things you may not agree with, or not see as very relevant to amateur radio. But I think you may agree that the days of getting a job, buying a house, cutting the grass on a weekend and twiddling with your radio from time to time just isn't the experience for a large and increasing number of people these days. This is the 'new normal'. We must change and adapt to people's reality, or the hobby will die even sooner than we expected.