I fear that homebrewing is a dying art, Martin.
73
Al - K8AXW
Al,
That one is a little difficult to quantify. If you restrict the conversation to ham radio, what is obvious is that the cost/benefit equation has changed because the inflation-adjusted cost of fantastic new gear is much lower than it was in the past.
Someone like me, starting to homebrew about a decade ago and without a legacy "junkbox" from picking over stuff at hamfests and so forth, ends up spending quite a lot of money just on components. Then there are the tools, and if you love good tools, you spend a lot. If you live in a small home, there is the added challenge of finding workshop space. (I am actively considering renting workshop space away from our home because finding enough space for a workbench in the new QTH is such a challenge.)
Finally of course there is the time involved, which can be huge, although it is hard to call that a "negative" factor because if you enjoy doing it, the more hours you spend, the better.
So very different in the past when homebrewing a really basic Novice rig was the only economic option for young, beginning hams. That, it seems to me, was the reason so many people homebrewed stuff. Some hams stayed with it for the rest of their lives, others moved on as soon as they could afford the commercial gear!
The golden age for homebrewing seems to have been about 1945-1960, spurned by economic necessity and the existence of abundant military surplus equipment and "junk" components from discarded TVs and so forth. By the mid-sixties, the cost/benefit equation was probably beginning to shift already.
The old ethos has not gone away completely. There are some homebrewers on this forum who manage to build much more advanced stuff than I do while still probably spending appreciably less money. You can often improvise with tools rather than having exactly the right tool for the job. You can pick up a widget at a hamfest or wherever for virtually nothing, and then design your circuit around it.
Also there appear to be categories of ham gear that are still often homebrewed. The two obvious ones are antennas (and their accessories such as tuners), and linear amplifiers. There also seems to be a thriving market in kits for basic QRP transceivers, and although a kit is not "fully" homebrew, it can be a gateway to homebrewing.
Here in the UK, magazines such as RadCom and Practical Wireless still churn out reams of homebrewing articles. Obviously, RadCom just comes in the mail because I'm an RSGB member. To my delight, Practical Wireless is in the newsstand at the corner store right next to my home in this small village!
You may be right that homebrewers like me, for whom the means are almost more important than the end, may be quite rare. But I suspect that they were rare in the past, too. What's changed is the economics.
The other day I was reading the RSGB manual for 1968, which included a description of the homebrewed G2DAF receiver. "... the construction and alignment of a receiver of this type cannot be undertaken lightly; for the average constructor the work involved is likely to take up to six months or more of leisure time." Nineteen tubes, double conversion, and all sorts of bells and whistles.
For me, that's bliss, although it is the sort of project that is way beyond my current skills and requires a long apprenticeship in homebrewing before it should be attempted. There is also the paradox that the most advanced building projects published in books would normally be built by hams who should be quite capable of designing their own gear, so you really have to wonder how many people built exact replicas of the G2DAF receiver "back in the day" (or for that matter, the U.S. HBR series of designs).
73 de Martin, G3EDM