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Last week, I went to lunch with a ham friend of mine. This fellow has been a ham for more than 60 years, and an ARRL member for most of that time. As we were waiting for our food, he says to me, “My ARRL membership is up soon, and I don’t think that I’m going to renew.”
When I asked him why, he said, “Well, it used to be that you sent them 30 bucks and you got a book. Now, you send them 60 bucks, and you get nothing.”
It’s more than just that, though. He said that he hardly reads QST anymore. “There’s just not that much of interest to me in QST,” he said. And, he went on, you have to read it with a special reader.
This, and a recent episode of the DX Mentor podcast featuring ARRL CEO David Minster, NA2AA, has got me thinking that the reason ARRL membership is shrinking is that it’s losing touch with its membership and with potential members. Two things stuck out for me. The first was Minster’s description of his operation of the super station on Bonaire during some DX contest. I suppose it’s a normal thing for a rich guy like him, who is pulling down $350,000 a year from the ARRL, but how many hams are going to get a chance to do this?
The second thing that stuck out is that at about the 1:33:30 mark, DX Mentor host, Bill, AJ8B, commented, “It appears to me that there’s a real strong growth in The Technician Class license. So, overall, that’s got to be pretty exciting.”
Minster re-directed the conversation immediately into a discussion of ARRL membership. He said, “I get asked the question pretty regularly that you know, there’s 750,000 hams and there are only 150,000 in the ARRL. (Note: It’s well below 150,000 right now.) You guys are terrible.”
He tried to blow this off by noting that many members of the Mormon Church and Orthodox Jewish communities get licensed for emergency preparedness and disaster communications. At He said flat out, “They’re not hams.” To blow off anyone with an amateur radio license as “not a real ham” just doesn’t seem like the right attitude to me, and isn’t emergency and preparedness communications supposed to be one of the pillars of amateur radio?
Now, he did go on to say that new Techs need mentors to help them get more involved with amateur radio. I agree completely with him on that, and I tell everyone that takes my class to consider me their mentor, and if they ever have a question or need help, to contact me. I’m proud of the fact that many people who’ve taken my classes are now active hams and having fun with amateur radio.
At any rate, the impression I get is that Minster isn’t all that concerned with membership. He certainly didn’t give any indication of that in his DX Mentor appearance, and I don’t see the ARRL taking any serious steps to increase membership. Instead of truly being the “national association for amateur radio,” they’re becoming an ever-smaller association of guys they consider to be “real hams.”
They’ve lost touch with long-time members like my friend and who knows how many potential members. What this means is that, in the future, ARRL membership will continue to fall, both in the percentage of licensed radio amateurs and absolute numbers.
