2023-03-09

There's a lot of silent keys. That doesn't bode well for the hobby or the services it provides.

What does that mean?

So, I've recently been getting into ham radio. And by recently, I mean over the last 3 years I've tried a number of times to really get into learning the hobby, ultimately for something else to get in the way and lead to me falling off the path again. And this time, I'm bound and determined to jump in headfirst, considering that in a lot of ways I'm quite burned out of tech as a hobby beyond cozy stuff like the Ctrl-C pubnix or Gemini.

And today I came across just about the saddest thing I've heard in a while: the National Silent Key Archive.

https://www.silentkeyhq.com/main.php?p=default.php

So, long story short: this website is an a community-maintained archive, an index, of amateur radio operators who have passed away. It's more-or-less the digital equivalent of a hobbyist mausoleum: these are folks recorded in a much more intimate detail (many of the actually recorded ones have pictures, names, even stories attached); in addition to having the known names, address and callsign of every FCC-registered operator as of $CurrentYear.

There's a really weird mix of the macabre and the reverent in terms of my feelings looking through this web page. I even found my great grandfather's old callsign. I feel connected to him in a way that I haven't in decades. Miss you, gramps.

I figure he'd be proud of me, nowadays. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and even if it does, sometimes the apple rolls back uphill after a few generations. :D I'm getting more of an interest in radio lately, like I've said, and I think that's a fun way to connect back towards my heritage.

So, what's the point?

I think it's fascinating and deeply saddening that such an interesting hobby is so significantly embroiled in geriatrification. Give it 10 years, and a huge chunk of the best minds this hobby still has will have died. That's sobering. Especially if I think back to 15 years ago, when I was interested in radio for the first time. Many of the pre-eminent folks in these social circles were already on their way out the door, per se. By now all the club presidencies have changed out, the exam givers have cycled who knows how many times. I'm sure I wouldn't recognize a soul.

The race of time marches ever onward. It waits for nobody and gives no quarter. If you don't document these people, this knowledge, then a whole realm of the old pre-Internet communications world dies with them.

I tie this into the smolnet and into the larger "war against privacy" that seems to be going on throughout the last 10 or so years, and say that the digital, textual realm that we currently inhabit over plaintext and TLS isn't too far away conceptually from what ham radio is: a bunch of people learning systems that nobody else really knows, all in the ultimate effort to communicate and be heard wherever they might be.

Closing thoughts

Suffice to say.. now I'm looking at the ARRL website and looking into getting my own manual and finally doing classes and certifications. It's time I started transmitting too instead of just listening.

Let's see when that happens. I think I'll take a few months to really get it downpat.

Cheers,

wholesomedonut

wholesomedonut at ctrl-c dot club