Foundations of Amateur Radio

Cars have been here for well over a century and so has radio. Cars pretty much start when Carl Benz first applied for a patent for his "vehicle powered by a gas engine" on the 29th of January 1886 which is regarded as the birth certificate for automobiles. Radio starts as a thing when Heinrich Hertz proves that radio waves exist in 1888. 

Since then things have changed, a lot.

Today, both these technologies, cars and radio, are everywhere. It's estimated that there are 1.47 billion vehicles on the planet today, in contrast, there are only 44 thousand broadcasters across the globe, serving about 4 billion people, or half the population. So, cars win, right?

Not so fast. The Wi-Fi Alliance estimates that there's 3.8 billion Wi-Fi devices being shipped this year alone and there's about 19.5 billion in use. Many of those are mobile phones, so they're not only using Wi-Fi, but GSM, CDMA, 3G, 4G or 5G radios. In many cases they'll have Bluetooth on board and will be receiving GPS information from the currently five constellations in orbit around Earth. Some will even have an FM receiver on board, just to cram another radio inside the same box.

To give you a better sense of scale, 2022 saw 4.9 billion Bluetooth devices shipped. In 2010 it was estimated that there were a billion GPS users, today there are more than six billion users being served by GPS systems for positioning, navigation and precision timing.

I haven't even talked about other uses of radio, like radar, astronomy, remote sensing, remote control, keyless entry and countless other related and interconnected technologies.

So, while there's a car for every five or so people, there's at least two Wi-Fi radios per person and probably more like a dozen radios per person when you start counting those embedded in our daily lives.

So, why is it that we have an estimated car enthusiast population of 10% and an estimated radio amateur population of 0.04%?

It's not to do with the popularity of the topic. Google trends shows that both cars and radio are consistently trending downwards at about 2% each year since 2016. Radio is consistently twice as popular as cars. When you rank the global popularity of cars vs radio, out of 47 countries, 40 countries care more about radio than cars.

South Africa and India care about cars 74% to 26% radio, even New Zealand, 56% vs 44%, cars to radio. At the other end of the scale, Peru, 2% cars, 98% radio. Germany, home for both Heinrich Hertz and Carl Benz, 92% radio, 8% cars.

Popular search engines aside, there are other places to look for content. Take platforms like Prime Video, Netflix, Apple TV+ and YouTube.

When you search for radio or cars on those platforms it's interesting to see what comes back and explore how relevant it is. I'll encourage you to do the experiment, but as a surprise to nobody, the results are universally woeful but illustrative. Searching for cars returns mostly relevant content, but a search for radio brings back results that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic. Seriously, on Netflix, two documentaries about Pele and Beckham, both famous footballers, neither known for their interaction with radio, rank higher than a documentary on Prime about radio astronomy, cunningly titled, wait for it: "Radio Astronomy".

Even the initially promising Netflix result "Amateur" in response to the term "radio" is about a 14 year old basketball player navigating the dark side of sports. While we're at it, just for giggles, I checked the closed captioning for the movie and the word "radio" doesn't appear in the movie, at all. Speaking of representation, Netflix recently published their entire list of content for the first half of the year. The word radio appears exactly once, "John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City" and that doesn't even turn up as a search result when you go looking for "radio". The word "cars" appears 18 times in the Netflix library.

So, why is it that topics like "radio", which is demonstrably twice as popular as "cars", and perhaps a dozen times more, let's call it, numerous, in society, has such a poor showing and what can we as connoisseurs on the topic of "radio" do about this?

Cars are represented in a plethora of movies, series and shows featuring reviews, mods, restorations and entertainment. There's topic specific channels and social media. There's shops, events, races and so much car merchandise. Is that what's missing in radio, or more specifically, amateur radio, marketing, or is it something else? I'm keen to hear your thoughts. My email address is cq@vk6flab.com, get in touch.

For my efforts, I'm publishing my podcast on YouTube and manually working my way through my back catalogue of over six hundred episodes, complete with a, YouTube imposed, limited five thousand character summary of the transcript, just to increase the chances of radio being a relevant search result when someone who's interested in our community comes looking.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB