What use is an F-call?

Being an Amateur is an exciting thing. It entertains and educates you, exposes you to new people and social experiences, it keeps you off the street and all in all, it's a great hobby. It's been around for over a century and continues to evolve.

The Foundation License, as I understand it, was created to stimulate the growth of the Amateur radio population. This seems to be a recurring theme, introduction of Novice licenses, restricted licenses and other variations in the past were created with similar aims.

There are some Amateurs today who feel that the Foundation License is too easy and lowers the bar too much and while I don't agree, I do understand the sentiment. The continued simplification of the license, in any of their guises is a dead-end street. The only final item on the path is to make Amateur Radio an unlicensed activity. Note that I'm not advocating this.

Getting new Amateurs into the hobby is an ongoing challenge. Our average age is increasing and our collective experience while it's increasing as well, does not appear to make the awareness of Amateur Radio in the wider community any greater.

We have a stigma that we're old crusty men who sit behind a radio listening to hiss and making funny noises with Morse keys while using a strange language mostly including the letter Q.

Of course, for some of us, that is true.

Fortunately, it's not true for all of us.

At meetings where Amateurs get together a recurring topic is how to stimulate growth in our pursuits. Some have suggested that we need to go to schools, others propose going to scouts, or to young adults with disposable income. There have been suggestions to promote Amateur Radio as a Sport, the pursuit of competition, the making of league tables, teams and weekly events.

All of these things are possible, some of them might even work, but fundamentally, unless we become visible in the public eye, we really don't exist in the mind of the general public.

What activities have you undertaken to share your passion for Amateur Radio and to make it visible to the world?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB