When I was looking for ham clubs, age difference wasn’t the underlying problem. It was the attitudes. Any number of them.
I’ve left a number of volunteer situations over offputting attitudes. The most recent was a telephone museum. They went nuts over how I was so young, and with an interest in such old technology.
They were excited by the prospect of having someone young.
I was there because I was interested in the mission.
There’s a misalignment, there.
The ham clubs I’ve been to largely had one of two problems:
- Boring. They didn’t do anything. Nice people though.
- Attitude problems.
Boring is preferred.
Attitude problems
Attitude problems doesn’t only mean the mentoring thing.
One ham club had very severe problems in culture. It was simply not pleasant to be there. That’s obvious enough and usually doesn’t last too long before the club dies out.
Another is this: There’s a type of person who never mentored anyone when they had the chance and are desperate to do it to anyone - not to teach or guide, but to be the teacher. It’s for their ego, not their mentee’s edification. I think this is very common in ham radio - we have a whole tradition of Elmering that’s largely died out except in a few isolated groups and the dreams of those I’ve just mentioned.
It’s a good dream! You should mentor! Just remember what the point is. You have to put real work into it, mentoring is not easy. It’s all the work that goes into teaching an individual. One size does not fit all.
Beyond the mentoring-for-ego thing, I think the raw, genuine excitement many hams have over meeting a new young ham simply puts the young ham on the spot.
All you have to do is treat young adults like adults.
They are. That’s also how they will grow the best!
Everyone is new sometime, everyone is new at different times
All your mentoring and learning opportunities should be for everyone. Learning and experimentation is the entire point of Amateur Radio. Look at the history of amateur radio, Amateur Radio, and the ARRL and equivalents, look at why we exist at all.
Young hams are not the only ones new to this hobby, and as the youngest ham in most ham clubs (in my 30s mind you!), I am never the one with the youngest ticket.
I got my ticket in early high school and the local clubs were absolutely desperate to be welcoming to young hams. Instead I never went back.
Isolate, celebrate, … integrate?
Specifically calling out young hams for special attention is a fast way to turn them off entirely. You can extend this to any situation; you can’t recognize otherness without making them outsiders. If they are young, they are likely especially sensitive to this - high school is only rarely a happy place. College is not much better. I won’t even get into demographic dimensions, I think those’re pretty well covered by now.
Even genuine kids - they’re not a hero for being interested in your hobby, no matter how excited you are. Don’t go giving them medals simply for existing as a young person in your space, even when that’s rare. You can’t do it without inherently claiming the space as yours, and them as an interloper, a guest.
Next time you’re at something like NEARfest or a similar ham fest, listen to how people talk about younger hams.
Really listen.
Ham Radio is HUGE
Any time you hear someone talk about “how to attract kids to ham radio”, see if, by their methods, they really remember what it was like to be a kid or if they are flailing around because they don’t remember.
You want to continue interest in the hobby? Talk about what excites you. You won’t appeal to everyone, that’s fine.
A new ham not being into HF, contesting, CW, or DXCC won’t kill you. But maybe you’ll spark something in a few, maybe even twenty years down the line.
Ham radio is huge. That’s true at any age, and for any sub-interest of ham radio. All interests are fractal.
You should see what metal detecting is like. They have high-drama tv shows about waving a beeping stick over dirt. They hook you with the history lessons though!
Showing what you enjoy, and not denigrating what others enjoy when they show it off, is what will show off the best of ham radio. Dabbling a bit in other parts of the hobby will both extend your own horizons, help you improve your own teaching, and allow you to make good introductions when the need arises.
Likewise, nothing kills interest like loud complaints about new people. I’ve seen this the most on HF contesting, but again, extend to any interest, any group.
ARRL
There are a ton of new hams, a ton of young hams, and very few of either are ARRL members.
ARRL has absolutely no idea why this is. They also seem to believe that you can only be active in radio if you’re an ARRL member.
No wonder I keep hearing about the death of ham radio despite it being more active than ever before!
ARRL, like any large group, has terminally lost sight of the mission and serves only itself. Maybe this is expected of any large group, but it’s no less a loss for that. ARRL was once critical to the survival of the hobby. I hope we don’t learn the hard way that it still is.
With every flail, ARRL digs deeper, because ARRL has, if not each leader individually then certainly as an organization, forgotten what it was like to be a kid and why they were into radio in the first place.
There are some pockets I’ve seen where leadership clearly did remember and understand, and I wish I’d saved those so I could recognize them here.
Let me sum up
Stop making a big deal of newbies and outsiders, you can’t recognize their rarity without excluding them.
This is raised to infinity for very public things, like, as a random hypothetical, making the youngest ham pick the door-prize ticket from the raffle basket and making everyone applaud them simply for being a young ham. Anyone with eyes could see how very uncomfortable that kid was. Is he coming back? I wouldn’t’ve.
Build your mentoring and overall culture to be friendly, unassuming, and kind, and make your learning opportunities gentle.
If you can’t climb the steep side of the learning curve, you are probably worse at teaching. These are both skills that can be learned through deliberate practice.
You will catch all people this way, not just young people.
That’s the ham radio we all want.
Post-script (essay part 2 something something boogaloo)
As a follow-on thought, I’m no expert at social dynamics or communication,
but I have slowly noticed that my friend who is very good with people
almost always asks lots questions before offering a response of
their own.
Still working on that myself.
That kind of attitude could be hugely valuable to your ham or any other club. Inculcating it throughout a large existing culture may be nearly impossible, but new ones can nurture it effectively.
I’ve seen it. Rarely, yes, but I’ve seen it.
The hardest part of this is almost all of the common problems come from a good place, started from a well-intended idea. You can’t shut people down for, e.g. the door-prize thing. No one there had a mean thought, they just didn’t recognize the cost. I believe the truly problematic ham to be rare, and the well-intentioned ham with a wrong technique to be distressingly common.
I guess the first thing, in the spirit of curiosity and asking questions, is asking:
“Why are you into ham radio?”
“What brought you here?”
If it’s not something that excites you personally, make introductions to someone they’ll have shared interests with. I think this is one of those things we’ve lost over the years, specifically, the graceful social skills of navigating a gathering are gone. They are indeed skills, that were once explicitly taught. They can be learned yet again.
Hams are a great demographic for learning this. There are rules for how to do this right and make people feel welcome. You could find a local group that does it right and learn by observation, or you could find an old social manual…
… but ultimately it boils down to clearly understanding why people are there, and giving that to them while making them feel welcome. Most of making someone feel welcome is smiling at them, telling them they are welcome (!), pointing out some people they might like to talk to, making yourself and others available in case they have questions, and offering food. Very little of that matters if you then make a big deal of them for their race, sex, age, or literally anything else.
Obvious! Yes! And yet most organizations struggle.
You can literally make people feel welcome by telling them they are welcome and then not contradicting yourself in some way.
How do kids make friends? They go up to each other and ask if they want to be friends. Then they go have fun together.
This works great at any age but adults won’t talk to their neighbor.
I like to party
Want to make a big hullabaloo? Not for the young ham simply for being a young ham of course. You don’t give out awards for running a marathon to someone who didn’t run - they will know not to value it, and then they will know not to value your awards. This is literally a participation trophy and as the last of the millenials please trust me when I say those are bad ideas.
What you should celebrate is the work people put into themselves, the group, the community, humanity, or the universe. They have beaten back entropy, the devil, and the cold uncaring void just a bit.
Once stated, it’s obvious. But go to your local social group for any interest and count how many places get this right consistently.
Making mistakes and culture
One place that did very little right, but did very little wrong (and was therefore very pleasant) was the local NH Tech Alliance meetup in Manchester.
Missteps, or worse, dissteps (sorry), have a greater negative value than the positive value of any class of thing your group can do right.
You can have, genuinely, a world-class mentoring group and still turn off some of the people that might otherwise have benefited simply by being too excited by someone being young and into ham radio.
Similarly by assuming they don’t know anything (just ask!), what they’re into (ask!), why they’re there (ask!), etc.
None of this matters if you have a sourpuss group for the board and are most excited by various rules of order for running the club. I don’t think that’s truly common, though I have cause for doubt.
For that matter, how much of the club administrativia has to be done at the club meeting? Why is 80% of every club meeting going over the minutes from the last meeting? Why are all our members only showing up to the casual breakfast meetings and not the regular business meetings?
Bottom line, but more so
In short, you attract new young hams the same way you attract any other ham.
By doing cool stuff they are into, and sharing it.
One local club has Dale, AF1T, who just loves operating microwave. I couldn’t have cared less before the one presentation of his, now I have some form of 1.2, 2.4, 5, and 10GHz.
He talked about the cool parts of microwave, like being clever about where you point your antenna and building your own radios. When’s the last time you saw that for presentation night?
Dale does it right.
I emphasize again that you don’t try to appeal to everyone, nor do you try to sell the parts of ham radio you aren’t yourself into. For all that it might seem otherwise, it’s a real skill to fake sincerity. Trust the other hams into the other parts of ham radio to ‘sell’ their interests just fine.
We’re nerds. Nerds are mainstream now. Act like it!
Wait, one last thought.
W2AEW on Youtube is doing it extremely right. That’s mentoring that scales. How to build, test, figure out, learn. Equipment, theory, practice. Good stuff. I don’t see a single video about “attracting young people to ham radio” but he’s done exactly that.
Most open source ham radio groups are getting at least the core part right - showing your work is hugely valuable. Writing about it even more so. That’s nerd candy, and healthy for you.
It also doesn’t diminish in the sharing.
Thanks for being into ham radio and making this hobby fun.
We’re in a golden age of learning, best get to enjoying it!
References
- Original form of this essay
wherein we prove that every essay in
current_year starts as a
tweetstormtootstorm. Brian Cantrilleat your heart outcall me. Also, dear reader, if you are reading this you will benefit from clicking on that name, it’s relevant to so much of the topic of this page.