Friday I was off. Never left the house. Worked on learning an application (Adobe Captivate 3), read a chapter on e-learning and edited some photos. I had a VHF radio parked on 146.52 Around noon a station (N5BF) comes on " Listening 52"....... He's a Jet Propulsion Lab engineer down the road. He commented how light the traffic is on 52. We both live up on a hillsides on the North Side of the Los Angeles basin and we can both hear SOUTH all the way to San Diego. That's a swath of real estate that is populated by 20 million people So if there is 1 ham per 500 people as some claim.....then there should be approximately 40,000 hams in Southern Calif. Let's cut that number in half. Make it 20,000. Hell let's do it again. Make it 10,000.

Still. the facts remain. Dozens and Dozens of repeaters sit silent. Day after Day in this second most populous region of the nation. 52 has maybe 20 Qso's a day on it. To what purpose is this spectrum available? And the discussions you do hear are of the most common and pedestrian exchanges.

The hobby is not dying. It is dead. It is not vibrant. It is not relevant. It is not stimulating to anyone who knows anything about current technology.

To say otherwise is to be in denial of the facts.

I still listen to low end 40 mtr CW (a last glimmering bastion of the origins of the hobby).... and occasionally tweak the noses of the No-Coders......but there is no reason to intellectually engage in Ham radio any longer. Perhaps a remembrance from time to time, but to be active in the hobby is to be numb to the exploding world around us. To be active in Ham Radio is to be without substance.

The critics of the absurdity of ham radio (K1OIK) know all this and the "full smoke" boys of 75 mtrs don't care, they just like to hang out like old men playing dominoes at a feed store in a small town. (And good for them!)

The public at large knows what hams themselves do not. That ham radio is not an exciting or dynamic community of communicators.

As Lloyd Dobbins of NBC News signed with in the 1970's...."And so it goes........ "

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wa4xxx