[Jeffhs]

I live in an apartment and cannot put up outside antennas, but that hasn't kept me away from the hobby or off the air. (I've been licensed over 30 years, just renewed the license a month or so ago, and am not about to give it up now.) I bought an indoor HF antenna (Barker & Williamson AP-10A apartment portable, 10-40 meters) which I use with my Icom IC-725. I'm also on the local 2-meter repeater (N8BC/R, 147.81-21), am a member of a local ham club and ARRL. Can't see myself ever letting my license expire or selling my gear. I worked much too hard to get my license just to let it drop like a stone.

The Internet doesn't offer the same thrills and excitement as working rare DX or communicating with someone via CW on the ham bands. Anyone can get a computer, a subscription to an ISP, and spend hours chatting with other online users in Internet chat rooms (and, of course, there is no license required), but it takes a special kind of person to be able to sit at the controls of an amateur station and communicate using CW with a straight key or paddle and keyer (not a keyboard). I've been operating mostly CW for over twenty years using the paddle/keyer combo, and enjoy it immensely.

As to contests, I have not been in any of them with serious intentions of winning because they are too fast-paced, and I like being able to talk with folks over the air, not simply exchange the same information over and over again. And how about those meaningless "you're 5-9 . . ." signal reports given out freely in every contest, including ARRL-sponsored ones? Come on. I don't care how good your antenna or receiver are; not everyone booms in at 5-9 in a contest. What ever happened to honest signal reporting? We hams are honest about signal strength during normal QSOs; why not in contests?

Gentlemen, amateur radio is dying, as it has been for some time. The enormous popularity of the Internet and other factors make the problem worse today than it's ever been at any time in the history of the hobby. With more and more young folks going to the Internet rather than becoming licensed amateurs, and many of us who are presently licensed not even using our privileges, not to mention folks dropping out of the hobby from boredom with humdrum contacts or for whatever other reason, I can see a day in the not-too-distant future when there may not even be an Amateur Radio Service any longer. We hams must make good use of our bands, or else the FCC may decide to reassign them to other services. Witness what happened to the first two megahertz of the 220-MHz band. This has been reassigned and is now being used by the United Parcel Service. Why? Because the band was being underused by the hams.

Who is to say the same thing won't happen to the rest of our bands eventually unless we use them more than we do? Witness the 6-meter band. Who do any of us know who even uses six meters anymore? If we don't start making use of this band, and soon, the FCC may, as it has hinted at doing in the past, reassign the entire band to FM broadcasting. How many of us remember when the frequencies which are now the 6-meter band was a television channel? (At almost 48 years of age, I am a bit too young to remember that [TV dials started with channel 2 by the time I was born in 1956], but I've read quite a bit about the history of the former channel 1, so I have at least second-hand knowledge of its existence.) This is a prime example of the "use it or lose it" philosophy, as is a later scenario involving the UHF television band (discussed below). The early TV broadcasters weren't using channel 1 nearly as much as the other channels (eventually 2 through 13 and later 14 to 83)--there were only a very small handful of TV stations, among them New York City's WNBT (now WNBC), using channel 1 immediately following World War II and until 1949 or so. The government saw this underuse of the channel as a lack of interest in its use as a television service, so guess what happened--the channel's frequencies were reassigned to land-mobile radio services and eventually became the ham 6-meter band.

The same thing has happened to the UHF television band. When this band was first opened to TV broadcasting in the '50s, it spanned a frequency range of 470 to 890 MHz--channels 14 to 83. The FCC had originally planned to move all TV to these channels eventually, but the plan fell through like a rock. UHF television never developed as much as the FCC had hoped, so in 1970 the agency reassigned channels 70(!) through 83 to land-mobile and other services, shrinking the broadcast service to channels 14-69. A few years ago the FCC reassigned the frequencies associated with UHF television channels 51-69 to digital high-definition TV services, forcing all analog stations currently operating on these channels either to go off the air (going exclusively digital and turning to cable or outright going off the air entirely; the latter was the course of action taken by a longtime UHF station in Missouri a couple years ago) or accept a reassignment to a UHF channel below 50. Stations which will not or cannot do this, for any reason, will be forced either to leave the air or become entirely digital on cable (which is where all television eventually will be anyhow--over-the-air analog NTSC TV is a dinosaur which is about to become extinct).

The UHF television band was whittled down to 55, then 36 analog channels over some 54 years because this band has not seen nearly the kind of growth the FCC had hoped for--use it or lose it, again.

The Amateur Radio Service may and probably will be next. Unless we hams want to see every last one of our bands turned over to other interests, we had better start using them a heck of a lot more than we do. If not, we will have no one to blame but ourselves if and when the FCC reassigns "our" bands to commercial services in the future, and the Amateur Radio Service ceases to exist.

73 (best of regards),