Hang around the amateur radio community for a few decades and its many peccadillos will be revealed to you one by one.

That’s to be expected from a hobby that includes hundreds of thousands of global adherents and has been around more than a century. There’s more than enough motive and opportunity for the occasional misdeed. Yet as much actual mischief we might create, we suffer an even larger problem, guilt. From the beginning, hams in the US have felt beholden to government for our band allocations with a certainty that these will be snatched from us at any moment if we don’t grow fast enough. We aren’t worthy of this gift we’ve been given and this promotes a need to improve.

We imagine all kinds of maladies about our hobby that may or may not exist. We’re too white, too male, too old, not technical enough, too technical. License testing is necessary, or not, and if it is, the test is too hard or too easy. Young people don’t find what we do with our 20th century hobby very compelling and it’s all our fault for having been born in the wrong century. Or for promoting it wrong. Or for enjoying ourselves while we know our happiness won’t attract younger operators.

Recently, I’ve been hearing (and reading) plenty of grumbling about local clubs not being friendly enough to newcomers. Same goes for our online communities. A random stat pulled from someone’s posterior postulates that “73% of new operators feel intimidated by online ham radio communities”. I’m suspicious these claims may be part of a disinformation campaign drummed up by the ARRL who has boldly declared 2026 “the Year of the Club”.

Or maybe it’s conjured by anti-ARRL forces that persist just below the radar?

All I know is new blood apparently isn’t flowing quickly enough into the body on life support to save it. According to “someone”. In my half century with a ham ticket I’ve heard the problem was CW, so we got rid of it. Then testing was too much a hassle so it was changed. Licensing was still too convoluted so we went from five license classes to three. Somewhere along the testing road we got rid of essay questions and circuit drawings and published all the answers in pools to be memorized. Then came the outcry “that’s too much for anyone to memorize!”

None of these changes filled our ranks to overflowing so we looked deeper and discovered we’re a bunch of old men and our group photos didn’t provide outsiders with a diverse enough look at who we are and what we do.

QST went through changes recommended by outside consultants who said ours was an image problem and we needed more photos of young ladies in QST so we got the infamous covers of models portrayed as working with radio gear that obviously wasn’t plugged in. We still couldn’t get enough young people so came the days of over promoting the not always impressive achievements of minors. Accuracy be damned, we were trying to paint a picture…

Having exhausted all those notions about what’s “wrong” with ham radio we now arrive at the conclusion du jour – we simply aren’t very friendly people.

And they could be on to something. After decades of being told that the hobby is dying and we are the problem, after all the self-flagellation from it being all our own fault, we’ve become a pretty damned grumpy lot.