I believe any difficulty in attracting and retaining new amateur radio enthusiasts comes down to a shortage of a very particular kind of imagination, not curiosity in general, which I don’t think is in decline, but the sprawling, restless kind that used to define who ended up sticking around. The retention problem is real: thousands of new licenses are issued every year, yet the pool of active operators only seems to shrink. Sometimes it sticks, but more often these days people get in and soon look for the exit. That in itself isn’t a problem. There’s nothing wrong with someone kicking the tires before deciding ham radio isn’t for them.

The harder problem, stirring interest among people who might find two-way radio worth a passionate pursuit, is one of timing. A hundred years ago, you could tell a young person about the possibilities of radio and passion came easily; it was new. Today, with the internet and a phone in every pocket, wireless communication can’t help but seem quaint. That’s still what we have to offer, though, and making it seem worth someone’s time is the tall order facing anyone trying to keep our ranks refilled.

I don’t think I can help much with that. I’m too old. Those of us who got into ham radio fifty or sixty years ago were enchanted by crystal radios and by pulling faraway signals out of the shortwaves. Amateur radio was simply the next step in that adventure. With fewer options for how to get on the air, few of us treated Morse code as a burden worth complaining about. We just wanted to join the party as quickly and simply as we could.

The 21st century is a different era, and 20th-century technology has lost its shine. Everyone understands that; times change. But something else is going on too. It isn’t that curiosity about how things work has declined, I don’t believe that for a second. It’s that a certain breadth of curiosity, the kind that used to turn a radio hobbyist into someone who built things and knew things and did things across a dozen fronts, has become rarer. When I was a teenager, I thought almost every older ham was a genius, because they showed me what they’d built and how they operated. Viewed through the rose-colored glasses of a 20th-century kid, it looked like a magical garden; obtainable, but only for those willing to put in the time to earn their way in.

If that sounds a little abstract, let me offer some evidence. A local amateur radio enthusiast recently passed after more than 90 years of living. A few lines from his obituary:

“He was an engineer by trade and temperament and began his career in the army, where, based on his drafting skills, he was selected to join the team developing rocket technology under the direction of Wernher von Braun in Huntsville, Alabama.”

You could stop right there, his association with von Braun and early rocket development would be enough on its own. But it wasn’t close to the whole story.

“After the army, he participated in the early development of integrated circuits and alkaline batteries. One of the machines his team invented, designed, and built was granted a patent by the U.S. Patent Office in 1973.”

That’s the career. Here’s the rest of him:

“His great lifelong passion was model aviation, a hobby he began as a young boy and which culminated in his work with the National Model Aviation Museum in Muncie, where his expertise and experience designing, building, and flying model airplanes made him one of the nation’s leading experts in the field. He supervised the museum’s acquisition and archiving of historical model kits. Several scale models of iconic military airplanes that he built are on display in the museum’s permanent exhibit.”

“Over the course of his life, he pursued several other hobbies with equal vigor and exactitude: motorcycles, ham radio, wine and beer making, and building replicas of Civil War-era firearms. He was a talented photographer and a voracious reader. Among his many interests were military history, railroads, and Native American cultures. In their retirement, he and his wife took up cross-country bicycling and racked up dozens of tours all over the United States.”

They aren’t making them like this anymore, and I think that’s a real part of why our hobby struggles to pull in and keep the kind of people who make it richer just by being in it.

Because sad is the ham whose only hobby is radio. I say that having been that guy myself, more than once. A newcomer who sits in on a net or a club meeting and hears nothing but a rundown of antenna gain and aches and pains isn’t wrong to wonder if this is really where they want to spend their evenings. If we want to fix the leak at the bottom of the bucket, that’s as good a place to start as any: not just recruiting new hams, but being, ourselves, the kind of people worth sticking around for.