Today’s song: Mendocino County Line.

A sign on the side of Interstate 69 in northeastern Indiana seems oddly out of place as it proclaims, “Come enjoy millions of Christmas lights in the heart of Amish country.” I get that it’s probably not the Amish who installed so many holiday lights for the public to view, but it makes me chuckle anyway.

It probably resonates with me because I frequently tell friends I feel like I’m one of the Electric Amish - I enjoy electricity and ham radio, but the older I get the more I lean into a simpler hobby experience. I’m all for advancing the art of radio, just not so much the science any more.

When nearly every query to every ham radio mailing list is unending pleas for help in making a remote via Ethernet connection between the main home station and a portable one in Aunt Clara’s basement three states-away, I wonder where we went wrong. When I listen to an HF net that’s been active for 64 years completely fall apart one morning because the NetLogger web application (used ubiquitously to manage net check-ins) was experiencing problems leaving control stations completely unable to manage the net, I wanted to get a tattoo that screams, “too much tech”. When Microsoft does whatever it did recently with Windows that caused many hams to go off the air because their station was no longer usable in its current configuration, I mourn the many ways we have enshittified our own hobby.

Amateur radio is a technical hobby, and some hams will always push the envelope of technology and that’s a good thing. The founders of our hobby literally molded radio into a viable medium through experimentation and incremental development. But the evidence suggests that most those with a ham ticket aren’t ready to embrace all that technology, and keep it running, and the result is usually embarrassing.

My point? My non-SDR Elecraft K2 and 1961 Vibroplex bug continues to rack up CW contacts even when the Microsoft drivers quit working, the IP tables get crossed, the cell network glitches, and it works when the Internet goes completely down.

Let’s face it, sometimes there is simply too much tech.