While browsing various sites today looking for an interesting article to post on the site I came across a UK story where the Surrey Electronics and Amateur Radio Society had signed up 100 new members for this year. Quite an achievement I thought, considering I had coffee with a ham from another club this morning and when I asked him how things were going in his club he said “we don’t do courses so we don’t have enough members.” Between that comment and the article it got me thinking about an article I posted back in June about if we had dummy up the exams to much.
The UK article said how excited this club was with these new members for what they will be able to achieve this year. Hmmm I thought. I wonder what they want to achieve and maybe clubs out here are missing something. To my fellow ham who said they don’t have enough members maybe the answer is not only offer a course but offer the course with a specific goal in mind. By a goal I don’t mean we graduated “x” amount of new hams. But, we need new hams to build a new radio room, a new repeater site, help promote our club in the community, emergency preparedness project, well the list is endless and each club could zero in on one maybe two goals.
Now when you advertise that you have a radio course to offer your advertising could go something like this. “ABC Radio Club is looking for people to help build the XYZ project. Our radio course will get you going so you can help us with this much needed project.” Now your attracting students who have a common interest, the proposed project.
To my way of thinking your now attracting people who besides getting there license can now honestly say they were involved in a project. Would that get our repeaters with more use? Would this generate a whole new generation of HF hams? I wonder! What do you think, leave a comment and let’s get a dialog going.
Coastal Ham Radio 