There will always be new hams interested in radio ars gratia artis. We need to capture them before you and other naysayers convince them that CW is out of date or difficult.
The question is whether (or not) we will be able to capture enough of "them" going forward to offset the increasing number of "us" who are now rapidly ageing and dying...or who have otherwise lost all interest in the hobby.
Right now, that isn't happening.
It is also quite apparent that YOU haven't actually heard the increasing silence on our bands lately, either. So, before you and others continue "shooting the messenger", perhaps you should first tune across the bands
for yourselves and honestly report on what YOU are hearing on our bands as compared with just a decade or so ago.
As I've said, OUR hobby,
unlike many others, relies on faceless politicians and bureaucrats to grant us continued access to scarce frequency spectrum in order for our hobby to even exist. And it shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that
without that continued access, our "hobby"
dies.And the truth you and others here seem to want to continually deny is that the world we live in is increasingly relying on
digital communications techniques. I can envision any number of digital techniques and applications (such as spread spectrum, to cite just one example) that would prove to be utterly incompatible with most of the current analog modes that we desperately cling to.
Indeed, my retired FCC staffer contact tells me the "everyone in their own slice of spectrum" way we are currently being regulated is, itself, evolving into a much broader approach where frequency spectrum is shared among multiple services using, for example, advanced digital multiplexing techniques.
In the grand scheme of things, the technologically ancient analog modes we routinely use (AM, FM, CW and SSB) are fast becoming little more than hold-out relics of an ever-more-distant past. They are fast being replaced by a whole plethora of new communications modes, some of which are still evolving, but most of which are absolutely incompatible with the largely analog modes we are using now.
Unless we can
quickly drag our hobby out of the sociological and technological 1950s, (and then "clean up our act"), I believe that we (and our Service) are ultimately headed for the trash heap of technological history, much like wind-up watches, pulse dial telephones and analog TV sets.
Indeed, most of the so-called "modern" communications equipment we still use today in our Service probably belongs in a museum.
Twitter and Facebook will come and go, but Morse and Vail have weathered the test of time.
But, as the old saying goes, "The times they are a changin'."
That's because portable
digital electronic communication devices (like the IPod, IPhone and IPad) are here to stay....as is the Internet itself. Unlike in times past, when amateur radio was the ONLY personal wireless medium (besides the portable telephone which only the very rich could afford), the youth of today now have INNUMERABLE ways to communicate wirelessly. I also find it telling that most of these modern advanced wireless communication concepts (and devices) were all invented OUTSIDE of the crucible of Amateur Radio.
And whether we like it or not, internationally, one of the expectations of those who grant us continued access to our frequencies is for us to carry on "technical investigations". The FCC has further defined those "investigations" to include "advancing the state of the communications art".
When we stop doing that...and I believe we largely
have stopped doing that by desperately clinging to arcane 1950s-era regulations and communications technologies as the "gold standard" by which all experimentation in our Service must still be measured...we run the very real risk of our spectrum being taken away from us and given over to someone else who will.
73,
Keith
KB1SF / VA3KSF