Ham radio is not dying, it's evolving

> 3. I have to learn technical and cultural nuance of Ham before being allowed to speak

Could I ask what this item means? That you needed a license, or is it possible that the repeater somehow enforced a class?

Here in the UK, we've seen a huge surge in people - especially younger people - getting licensed since lockdown, in large part because it's now possible to take your license exams online. I think that the RSGB (our ARRL) had severely under-estimated the amount of friction in the old examination system and the amount of pent-up demand created by things like RTL-SDR.

Because ham radio is fun. It's a different hobby than the other myriad ways of communications which you describe. It's a radio service explicitly dedicated to the personal enjoyment of radio. It is not a personal communication service in the likes of FRS, GMRS, or even part 15 (wifi), microwave, or cellular networks.

Think of ham radio as a sandbox for radio experimentation. There is a LOT to ham radio that you've overlooked.

It is however unfortunate for many commenters on HN is that encryption is not allowed on amateur spectrum, but it's important that it stays this way. The amateur radio spectrum is worth billions of dollars to the telecom industry, but we've been fortunate to have it protected by the FCC (in the US) and international agreements. If encryption were allowed, there would be no reasonable means of verifying that a communication on ham radio is compliant to its regulations, especially those preventing communications of a pecuniary interest. In other words, encryption would open the doors to telecom companies and other businesses to use amateur spectrum instead of acquiring a license for radio services that would otherwise suit their needs, i.e. an illegal workaround to save money from licensing fees. Encryption also puts a downer on the spirit of ham radio, which is built on random conversations between the technically minded folk on ham radio to share information and knowledge of ham radio itself. You can't drop in on an encrypted conversation.

There could be changes to regulations that would mitigate these concerns (for example periodic unencrypted plain text/voice identification, private keys made public and broadly shared, etc), but such changes would be hard to come by, especially blocked by international bureaucratic processes, and a lot of the "old guard" fearful for the state of their hobby were encryption to be allowed.

Ham radio also has a broad base of experienced communications volunteers, which comes in handy during earthquakes, hurricanes, rural/remote search and rescue, in which the amateur service supplants ruined communications infrastructure while telecommunications companies and governments mobilize their recovery efforts. Examples include 9/11, Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, Irma, Andrew, and more, numerous fires in the west US, earthquakes of Haiti, Iran, China, and Indonesia; and even plays a role in ground-truth tornado spotting and tracking.

Why do people buy vinyl records or ride horses?

There's something completely magical about making an inter-continental contact with 5 watts and a wire in a tree, or bouncing your voice off an amateur-built satellite with a handheld yagi. There's an eerie beauty to the atmospherics on the HF band, the music of signal emerging from the noise. The anticipation of the dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dah-dit-dah of a CQ call, the excitement when a rare callsign weakly breaks through, the frenzied pile-up of operators jostling to get their QSL. The bizarre geopolitical madness of 7055kHz.

Hardly anyone needs to use amateur radio, but it can be a tremendous amount of fun.

http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/

I am always very suspicious of graphs that use a vertical scale that doesn't start at 0. It makes you think the ham radio population has doubled or tripled, while in reality it only gained a few percentage points.