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Hey, good evening, everyone. It's time for HamTalk
Live. It's episode number 199, The State of the
Hobby Survey 2020, recorded live on Thursday,
February 13th, 2020. I'm your host, Neil Rapp,
WB9VPG. Thanks for tuning in to this episode
of HamTalk Live. Tonight we're joined by Dustin
Thomas. N8 RMA and we'll take your calls live
in just a few minutes. Last week we didn't have
a show. I had to work, I had to announce my one
Thursday night basketball game of the season,
so there wasn't a show last week if you missed
us, but the week before Don Wilbanks, AE5DW,
was here to talk about news lines. Bill Pasternak's
birthday bash. It was a special event. I was
able to run about an hour of that and we had
several people from the Newsline staff and friends
of Newsline on the air last weekend. It was a
lot of fun. So if you missed that show you can
listen anytime at HamTalkLive .com or on your
favorite podcast app or on YouTube where you
can catch the rebroadcast. over on WTWW shortwave
that's 5 0 8 5 a .m. on Saturday evenings at
about 6 30 p .m. Eastern Time. Next week, February
20th, it's episode number 200 of HamTalk Live.
We'll take a look back at the first 199 episodes.
Have some fun. We have a lot of fabulous prizes.
ICOM sent us some swag bags to give away to our
electronics sent to some good prizes for including
PL 259s power poles all kinds of stuff and LDG
electronics is going to give away a $200 tuner
in honor of the 200th episode so be sure to tune
in live next week February 20th and you might
just be a winner Now, tonight we do have a new
phone number. We're unleashing a new phone number
here. That's going to be our new permanent phone
number. If you've been following the show for
a while, you know that we've gone through issues
with Skype and other... systems and things work
for a while and so thanks to Marty in N1C for
rebuilding the phone system yet again and we've
got a new phone number that we're going to start
using and we don't have the hold music there
yet to where you can listen to the show while
you're on hold. You're just going to get some
some random music when you call in but but supposedly
everything and we've tested this out it's going
to put everybody on hold so when you call you'll
hear music and then you'll be in line and it
will send everybody in first come first served
on the show so we're going to try that out so
we have a new phone number so let me give you
the new phone number so you can Write that down
and have that ready to go. It's 859 -982 -7373.
859 -982 -7373. And so we're going to put that
on the air tonight. We've been testing it out
and everything seems to be working fine. Famous
last words, of course. Think we've got it all
figured out except for the whole music and we're
gonna get that too. So 982 -7373 and the area
code is 859 For calling in tonight and from now
on hopefully so you can also Get a hold of us
on Twitter if you'd rather type It's at ham talk
live on Twitter. And so we're gonna talk to Dustin
for a little bit and then We'll take a break
and then we'll come back and then we'll announce
when it's time to call in and Ask your questions
with Dustin So we'll be back to do that right
after this word from tower electronics right
here on ham talk live Is this getting serious?
I think so. Well, how do you feel about it? Just
imagine if you hadn't run out of PL -259s. Just
imagine if your connectors weren't from Tower
Electronics. Consider the sophisticated quality
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Tower Electronics, the hams dime store since
1978. We're not sure what's up with the fifth
dentist, but four out of five dentists recommend
listening to ham talk live Thanks to Scott and
Jill at tower electronics for sponsoring the
show tonight to help bring you ham talk live
Their ham fest schedule coming up February 22nd.
They'll be at the Dalton, Georgia ham fest and
then March 7th. They'll be in Cave City, Kentucky
and You can visit them anytime anywhere at PL
-259 .com Well tonight our guest is Dustin Thomas
in 8rma. He was first licensed in 2014 and upgraded
to general in 2015. He's a member of several
clubs, including the mall city contest group,
which focuses on radio sport. And he's a member
of the young amateurs radio club or yark. which
is a group focused on bringing up the next generation
of radio amateurs. He's also a member of the
Kalamazoo Amateur Radio Club and the Southwest
Michigan Amateur Radio Team. He enjoys contesting
and working DX and spent much of his youth participating
in Boy Scouts. He's an Eagle Scout and a member
of Order of the Arrow and professionally he's
a senior analyst for Stryker that specializes
in enterprise architecture where you align technology
with business strategy, evaluate some organizational
capabilities, and identify areas for risk and
growth. So that kind of rolls over to what we're
talking about tonight. uh... identifying some
areas for risk and for growth uh... because we're
going to talk about this state of the hobby survey
that uh... dustin has been doing for a few years
now so dustin welcome to him talk live a thanks
for uh... thanks for having me on the show and
for the uh... warm introduction yeah it's been
has been good to talk to you actually uh... Got
around to asking you to be on the show because
I needed some statistics And so we were working
on some some youth on the air stuff and and I
was reading Actually, it was the telegram group
over in I are you region one? Where one of the
young hams over there had to do a presentation.
I think he was from Italy if I remember right
he had to do a presentation. He got on there
and said, okay, I need everybody to tell me how
many young hams you have in your country. And
I'm going, uh, uh, uh, well, let's see, let me
start counting. And I'm like, wait a minute,
that's not going to work. And so, um, Sterling
in zero SSC, it actually used some of your state
of the hobby survey results in, um, presentation
that he and I made it at Collinsville here a
couple weeks ago and I was like Maybe I better
get a hold of Dustin and see if he can help out
and you did you got me enough numbers that I
could Kind of make an estimate on how many young
hams we had and so we end up we end up kind of
rounding it off about 7 ,000 It's kind of where
I estimated it Yeah, and really that's a big
part of why I do the surveys. I want folks to
be able to use those numbers and every year as
the survey grows and I have more and more respondents,
I get a better overall picture of things exactly
like that. Like what are the age demographics
of members of the hobby? Also, the same day that
you emailed me, I had Josh over at Ham Radio
Crash Course email me with almost the same request.
His stream last week on Saturday started off
a conversation about keeping Ham Radio relevant
and he used a lot of the slides and analytics
that I created from 2019 for that. And I have
to tell you, I couldn't be more pleased. Really,
this is a fun thing that I like to do every year,
but really it's more rewarding for me to see
other people try to use that to generate conversation
and see how we can improve this hobby here in
our local cities and towns and globally even.
Well, Josh has got some cool stuff over at ham
radio crash course and if you haven't seen that
you need to You need to check that one out because
he's got some some cool stuff going on over there
But you know, it's things like that, you know
that Josh is doing and then I was working on
this that when you write up a proposal and you
need some statistics or you write up a presentation
and and you need some numbers to throw out there,
there's just not that much you can do. I mean,
you can get the FCC database and you can get
kind of similar things from other countries,
but they don't keep track of birth date anymore.
That's something that's important to get some
demographics on the hobby. And so you've kind
of stepped in and started to fill that gap with
this survey. So tell us a little bit about the
survey and how that all got started. Yeah, absolutely
well the first thing that I always like to tell
folks is that this is not a scientific survey
I'm not a statistician or a data scientist You
won't find this in any peer -reviewed journal
or anything like that That said though, I'm asking
operators for their opinions and for some general
information on topics that matter to us and the
second part of that is making sure that those
results are made public for the whole community
to consume. And that was really critical for
me. So this whole venture started back in 2017.
I was browsing the amateur radio subreddit and
I noticed sort of a proliferation of these highly
specific short surveys that were popping up on
there. And I thought they were really cool. Just
to give you an example, it was like, hey, if
you're involved in AMSAT, take this quick survey.
Or if you're a new ham under the age of 25, take
the survey. And for the ones that were applicable
to me, I would take the survey. But I never was
able to see the results. I would give them the
data and then. Often to the ether it would go
so I decided just being a curious guy myself
to create my own survey and and to sort of explore
the state of the hobby as a whole and It was
it was it was fun in 2017. It was a shorter survey.
I had a lot of fun. So In 2018 I decided to do
it again This time, the response rate tripled
and I thought that was fantastic. That was sort
of the mark and I said I'm going to do this annually
as sort of a health check. I wanted it to be
independent from commercial or regulatory bodies.
I didn't want this to be sponsored by a radio
manufacturer or from the FCC or from even our
advocacy groups like the ARRL, although I do
appreciate when they promote the survey each
year. That's sort of how it came to be. And I
really want to push the results just as hard
as I push for people to take the survey. I want
the data to be there for people to use in conversations,
in club meetings, wherever they might be talking
about things that pertain to our hobby. Yeah,
and it's very useful. Anytime you do statistics,
or as we here in Indiana say, statistics, you
got to watch out for having some kind of bias.
And you're always going to have some kind of
bias. But, you know, like you said, if you have
a particular manufacturer or a particular organization
or something that skews your numbers, that changes
You know who participates in the survey and having
it independent i think is a good move because
it does reduce some of that bias. Absolutely,
and I'm the first to admit that there's still
bias that's contained within my survey and sort
of a personal goal aside of the survey is every
year I try to grow it and mature the survey and
if I go back and I look at the survey I published
in 2017, I almost cringe a little at some of
the ways that I worded questions and I learned
from that. I took a lot of feedback from people
who reached out to me and said, hey, I have some
suggestions for you. and I try to incorporate
that and mature it each year to reduce that.
But I'm also the first to admit that it's a very
biased survey in terms of specific to U .S. hams.
I would love for this to be sort of a global
survey for radio amateurs across the globe. But
a lot of the questions and maybe the way that
I ask them are targeted to US HAM. So you're
right. In anything like this, you have the concern
of bias. And I try to do the best that I can.
But at the end of the day, I'm just a radio operator
like you, like everyone else. And I'm asking
some questions that hopefully will spark some
discussion amongst us. And that's really the
goal. Well, and that brings me to the next question,
you know, what what are you trying to accomplish
with? the results and you know if you had you
know Your dream of what would come out of this.
What would that be? Yeah, great question. I think
this is the first year where I've really sort
of solidified this into what I think the survey
is and what I want it to be moving forward. And
to give you a little bit of backstory here, I'm
a firm believer in understanding the point A
to point B journey, where point A represents
our current state where we are today, and point
B represents progress, growth, and success. It's
much easier to get to point B if you know where
you're at with point A. It's like trying to go
on a road trip. If you're trying to get to San
Francisco, but you have no earthy idea where
you are, it can make it a little trickier. So
really that's what the goal of the survey is,
to help us better understand point A, and then
maybe anticipate a little bit of our roadblocks
that we're gonna have on our way to point B.
So to that end, we have three core tenets for
the survey. The first is spreading awareness
in the community. So what is working in advancing
our hobby? What is not working? What are some
new trends that might be appearing? I'll tell
you right now just as a side note I sort of anticipated
the FT8 wave before it happened. You can sort
of see it in 2017, a little bit in 2018, and
then in 2019 it was in full bloom. So it's a
great way to see some of those trends as they
surface. It's a good way to see areas of concern,
maybe what are some challenges that we'll have.
The second tenant that we have is sparking conversation
among operators. I know I've talked a lot about
that already, and I really do want to beat it
to death. I want operators to talk about the
results. Do they agree with me? Do they disagree
with me? I want clubs discussing the results
to say, hey, this is what it says this year.
Do we agree with it? Do we not? The things that
we do agree with, how can we sort of approach
that and try to improve this situation. Great
example is Josh, last week on Ham Radio Crash
Course, talking about ways we can keep Ham Radio
relevant starting with some of the statistics
that I got last year. So, great example of that.
Really, the last thing is I want it to be a fun
event that people look forward to. I hope people
enjoy taking the survey. There's one thing that
I've learned since I was licensed and that's
radio amateurs are an opinionated bunch. I hope
that they enjoy making those opinions heard on
a yearly basis. And then I hope that once I get
the results, I hope they like reading the results
and find them interested. So really, those are
the things that I'm trying to accomplish with
this. Well, speaking of the results, are there
any that just really surprised you? Were there
any results where you're just like, wow, I just
didn't think about that? I have to tell you,
I've never ceased to be amazed every single year.
There are so many of these surprising or shocking
results that I'm just going to start talking.
Feel free to cut me off when we hit our tie here.
I'll start with this. Last year, I polled those
who were unlicensed but interested. in amateur
radio. So really, I wanted the survey to be the
state of the hobby for those of us who are licensed
amateurs, but I realized I had a lot of people
who were not licensed but interested who wanted
to participate. So I built some logic into the
survey, and if they were trying to get their
license, studying or interested, I had a different
survey for them. And I found that only 29 % of
those people were encouraged by an Elmer or a
mentor to get licensed. I mean, that to me blows
my mind. Only 29 % were encouraged by somebody
who's currently an amateur radio license holder.
I was also surprised that most of them, 86 %
of those reported not having other members in
their family who were radio amateurs. Now that
one's a little bit less shocking to me. My grandfather,
Larry, is a licensed amateur but my father isn't.
It's kind of skipped a generation. But that was,
to me, I think was interesting. And I think finding
out what drew these people to radio will be critical
in keeping the hobby moving forward. We have
to figure out what was that light bulb that said,
hey, I want to do this. So I think that was really
interesting. It's kind of surprising in working
with the young hams so much is you know a lot
of Young hams get in because you know dad did
it grandpa did it that kind of thing But yet
some of them that we're getting right now that
that have really You know rose to the top That
they have no other connection with family and
it's really surprising It is right now. My son
Riley is actually taking a technician class.
They offer it in traditionally in the fall at
the Red Cross in my town here and It's the same
class that I took many years ago, and there's
there's three Folks in that class under the age
of 25 my son included now two of them have family
members who are our radio amateurs the other
one doesn't and He said that he was interested
because I made sure to corner him and ask him.
He said he's a pilot He's going to Western Michigan
University to be a pilot and they use radio communications
there and he thought it was an interesting hobby.
Obviously, I think there's some work we can do
in figuring out what that aha moment was. There
was a question that I asked last year that I
have to say was sort of a guilty pleasure. You
would be shocked about how many people are offended
that I refer to amateur radio as a hobby. I still
get emails about that today from last year. So
I decided to ask, is it a survey, is it a hobby,
is it an avocation, what is this thing? Now I'm
happy to report that 83 % of respondents agree
that it's both a hobby and a service. So a large
chunk of people, I think it was 99 % say it's
at least a hobby. It could also be a service,
but it's a hobby. we can put that one to bed
and I don't have to rename my survey. Well, you
know, I've been a ham for 40, jeez, now I can't
even remember 44 years now. And still, when somebody
asked, well, ham radio, what's that? There's
not a quick way to answer that. I mean, that's
like an hour long discussion. And so, you know,
you start talking about it being a hobby, but
then you start talking about all the service
and it's like, what is it? And so I think you're,
you're right on the money there. that you know
some people will see it as a hobby and they're
just on you know to get on the air and talk to
people and then there's other people who are
really into the service part and want to do all
the the public service events and and that kind
of thing and and there's so many different ways
that you can go and branches that you can go
out that that not everybody's going to see it
that way. Absolutely. It's such a multifaceted
hobby or service, whichever you prefer. However
you do it is fine with me. There was another
thing that I think probably the result that most
surprised me was the impact of having other family
members, your spouse included, who also participate.
I ask folks how long they've been licensed and
how long they've been active. I think it's important
to understand the difference and if there's a
gap, understand why. On average, you'll be licensed
for two years longer than someone who doesn't,
and you'll be active for six years longer than
their counterparts. It's definitely a driving
factor in keeping people active with their license.
I think for the spouse, it's very similar. On
average, they're licensed around the same. but
they're active for five more years than their
counterparts where their spouse doesn't. So I
think it's important going back to where we said
86 % of people who aren't licensed don't have
other radio amateurs. Well, I hope that changes
because the numbers show it will keep people
more active in the hobby for longer. Very good.
Let's table that one and we may come back to
that after the break here and talk a little bit
more about some of that. But before we go to
break, we want to talk about this next one that's
coming up. You've got a new one that's going
to be released soon. You've got a little traveling
to do and then when you get back it's going to
come out. So tell us how we can participate in
the survey and when and all the details. Absolutely.
So typically I like to run the survey during
the month of March. and the results are published
mid -March. I'll be traveling towards the end
of February into March this year, so the survey
will run mid -March to mid -April. I don't have
an exact date yet, but look for it during that
time frame. There is a change to the survey this
year in that it'll be completely anonymous. In
years past, I've asked for a call sign. That
was some feedback that I received that people
didn't like providing that, so this year, no
call sign required. You can provide it if you'd
like, but it's going to be optional. I generally
post on a lot of Facebook radio groups. QRZ .com
usually will put it on their news section. I
get a lot of responses from them, so thank you
to them. I put it on Reddit and Twitter, so be
on the lookout for those. The best way, though,
to connect with us is on our site. It's radiosotth
.org. That site has surveys when they're released.
It has links to our results and some other information.
You can subscribe there so that when the survey
is released, you'll get an email. everyone take
it. It's an annual survey, so don't feel like
if you did it last year or the year before that
you don't have to take it. I'd love for you to
take it every single year. And thank you to those
who spread the word with their podcasts and their
blogs and their YouTube videos. I couldn't do
it without that help. Yeah, and we can certainly
announce it here too when you get ready to to
release that. We can mention that here on the
show so we'll do that for sure and we'll put
it out on our social media as well. some valuable
information and statistics coming out of this
survey. So hopefully all of you can participate
when that comes around. Well we're going to take
a break right now and then when we come back
we're going to open up the phone lines at 859
-982 -7373 and we'll check the tweets and see
what questions you have. for Dustin right after
this word from ICOM right here on HamTalk Live.
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about ICOM radios. Join the conversation. Give
us a call at 859 -982 -7373. Again, the number
to call is 859 -982 -7373. Or if you'd rather
type than talk, tweet us at HamTalk Live. Now,
here's Neil Rapp with more HamTalk Live. Oh,
yeah. You're talking ham radio, baby. You're
listening to HamTalk Live with Neil Rapp. ICom
America brings HamTalk Live your way each and
every week. Visit them at icomamerica .com slash
amateur. HamTalk Live is on the air every Thursday
night at 9 p .m. Eastern Time right here at hamtalklive
.com and be sure to check us out on Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram. And right now it's time
for your call. So if you have a question for
Dustin, give us a call right now. at the new
phone number it's 859 -982 -7373 again 859 -982
-7373 and yeah you're going to hear music the
system is going to pick up and put you on hold
and then it'll forward the calls to us one at
a time so if you get music you've reached the
right place You can also tweet us at ham talk
live and if you're listening to us on WTWW or
on the podcast edition You won't be able to reach
us because it's Thursday night right now and
and you're not listening to us at Thursday night
So we're not there. So We'll go back to Dustin
we were talking about the State of the Hobby
Survey with Dustin Thomas in 8RMA. And again,
we want to take your questions, so give us a
call 859 -982 -7373 or tweet us at HamTalkLive.
And we do have a tweet from Jim K5ND, a regular
for the show. And Jim says, fun comment from
your guest. Radio amateurs are opinionated. Who
knew? No, he says, I agree. Uh, my tongue in
cheek thought is that if you don't like to hear
opinions, don't take up a hobby that requires
a microphone. Very true. I couldn't have said
it better myself. So yes, everybody's gonna,
gonna have an opinion and, and, and some of these
questions, uh, definitely, uh, Definitely stir
up some opinion. So You know if people are on
the fence, they're not sure what to call in about
I'll say Going back to what I was surprised about
was how reluctant people were to put their call
sign to their survey. If you want to talk about
why you would be reluctant to provide this type
of information with your call sign, I'd love
to have a conversation. If you have an opinion
on that, and I'm guessing that you do out there,
call in and let me know why. Yeah, that's always
that's always the trick to call -in shows is
you got to come up with some controversy to get
people to The call in so here we go we can come
up with a bunch of them, you know We can go for
the for the what was it that yours? He said was
on last year's signals Yeah, the hobby or service
and then is it acceptable to use cue signals
on voice and yep We can really stir it up Yeah,
give us a call And I love you know I I get I
get so many emails from people who are are mad
I get I get just as many emails from people who
really enjoy it and are very complimentary, but
I actually have this little chart that I made
up about my level of enthusiasm around this initiative,
and it's very, very high in January and February,
and then March, when it releases, it plummets.
It's an all -time low in April, and then it stays
real low until maybe Thanksgiving, and then I
suddenly get amnesia, and then it shoots right
back up, and I'm ready to go for the next year.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And trust me, being a host
of a internet radio show. Yeah, that happens
too. You're like, Oh my gosh, these people on
QR said forums are driving me nuts. How am I
ever going to live with myself? And then, Oh,
well, time for another episode next week. So
yeah. eight five nine nine eight two seventy
three seventy three is the number and Can you
give us maybe a few statistics from the survey
about who is responding Yeah, yeah, so actually
pull up once your survey here and so much I don't
have much of it memorized here so at least in
terms of of My responses from last year, a large
majority of them were from qriz .com, 44%, which
is a great chunk. Facebook was 19 % of the responses.
Email, I was very surprised, came in at about
15%. And amateur radio, sites or blogs, was 7,
with Reddit being 6. That was something else
that surprised me. The user base of Reddit, that
community is a great age demographic that I would
love to get the opinions of that group. Roughly
55 % of the Reddit user base is under the age
of 49. And I would love to get more responses
from them. But every single year I post it, it's
downvoted immediately and it's lost in obscura.
And a lot of people reach out to me and say,
I didn't even see it on Reddit when you posted
it because it immediately goes away. So a little
disappointing. So if you're listening out there
and you're on Reddit, help me out this year and
give me an upvote when I post it. Boost that
up a bit, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's really
it. That's it. And you know, I'll tell you some
some other fun statistics that I found was that
the the average operator owns three and a half
HT's I thought that was interesting because we
always talk about how many we have laying around
that I look I turn around and look and I have
four on my desk So that's perfect, right? But
I want to know how do you get the half? Belfast
you take the back. Yeah, you're about to get
ready to say Oh now we got to hit the bow thing
button here But but yeah, you just take the bat
the bat. Well the battery wouldn't be half Yeah,
I don't know Let's see. I'm trying to think.
Let's see. I've got one two three four Yeah,
okay, I guess I'm a little over average To they
sort of make up make up the difference there
and Another thing that I found interesting that
I learned this year was that the average operator
spends 28 hours a month operating, which that's
a lot, I think. I don't think I spend that much,
but it was interesting. So, 28 hours a month
operating, making on average 65 contacts per
month. I thought that was kind of interesting
to know. So where do you fit? Are you above average,
below average there? Oh, I'd say I'm probably
below average because I spend all my time working
on, you know, shows and news line and youth.
There's a bunch of us that are like, you know,
I know I've heard word silver in zero AX say
this. It's like, I'm never on the air because
I'm spending so much time doing all this stuff
to promote people being on the air and help people
be on the air that I'm never on the air. And
you know, and in my role, that's been kind of
the case because like even at field day, it's
like, can I get on the air for an hour? Can I,
can I just like. Can I just like run for a while
because um, you know always coaching and you
know Taking care of this taking care of that
and it's like, you know, I help everybody else
get on and it's like I want to get on for a while
I yep. I completely I completely understand that,
you know, i'm i'm fortunate that the survey Takes
a lot of time. It's um It's about 40 hours worth
of work. It's maybe 10 hours in preparation,
and then maybe 30 with the analysis. So over
the course of that six weeks, I'm spending maybe
40 hours on it. But then I sort of get a year
to relax, or 10 months to relax. Then I can operate
within that time frame. Yeah, so so is the time
frame that you chose for the survey in March
their strategy to that There there wasn't I think
it spawned from the first survey in 2017 and
it just happened to be I did that year I did
two weeks in March and found that it wasn't enough
and just decided Well, all right, I'm going to
try this again in 2018 and might as well keep
it at the same time, but I'm going to open it
up to four weeks first too. And it just kind
of stuck. It sort of works out too. I hear a
lot of clubs during the summer aren't doing a
lot until field day. It seems like field day
is their summer activity. So in March leading
up to April is sort of the end of their club
year. So I think it works out works out fairly
fairly well Yeah, you know, I think contest season
is kind of kind of winding down a little bit
and and you know, we got Hamvention coming up
and You know, so I think it's a good time to
do it Well, let's let's talk a little bit about
you know the future and I don't want you to give
away anything that would affect the results of
the survey, but but you know, do you have anything
new that's coming up this year or maybe in 2021
that you're kind of thinking, you know, a direction
you might head in the future with this? Yeah,
so I'd So a couple things almost any new question
that I've added to the survey Comes purely at
the suggestion of others So this year there's
going to be a field towards the end where if
you have a question that you'd like to see on
the survey You can throw it on there. I'll take
a look at all of those You can always drop me
an email as well. I'd love to hear from you And
while I try to approach this holistically, like
I mentioned before, the survey topics do tend
to slant more towards US hams. So in the future,
I'd love to partner with some hams that are outside
the US and that are interested in being a part
of the survey and kind of helping shape it for
a more global reach. Specifically for 2020, a
couple of new questions that I'll be asking,
and I don't mind giving these away now. I'm asking
about DVAPs and hotspots, jumble spots, whether
you have one or whether you don't. I'm asking
about space weather. I'm asking about vintage
radios. And I'm also going to be asking about
remote ham stations. And all four of those came
from folks on Twitter or on the blog or email
saying, hey, I'd like to know more about that.
So that's sort of what's new, where I'd like
to take it. I do have a Patreon open on the blog
if you'd like to donate to this initiative. It's
not about making money. I would like to move
to a more robust survey platform. Currently,
I'm using Google Survey. There's some better
ones out there. But they can be quite pricey.
So that's going to be new if people want to donate.
And if they don't, that's fine. That's not a
problem. That's not why I do it. And lastly,
I'd like to see more people, more return visitors
to the survey. In 2018, 7 % were returned visitors.
Last year, it was 15%. I'd love for it to be
closer to 50 % in 2020 and then 75 % in 2021.
I'd like to get the people who previously took
it back and then new folks to join in. All right,
sounds like a good plan and I wish you continued
success because these statistics are really important
whenever we're trying to plan and promote and
do things. It's really good to have the numbers
to back things up. And you're really the only
source of that on a large scale at this point.
So we appreciate all your work on all of this.
And we have come to the end of our time. So let
me check the tweets here one more time and see
if we have anything here. And then let me give
you a chance to. Just throw out any final comments,
anything we missed along the way. Feel free to
do that and we'll wrap things up. Yeah, absolutely.
So the thing I want folks to know is that I want
this to be fun. I want this to be interesting.
There's a section towards the end that has just
a long text field. We call them verbatims. put
your opinions in there. I love reading them.
I read every single one. I read all 3 ,000 of
them. I love to read what drew people to the
hobby. I love to read what they want to see on
future surveys. If you have a ham radio blog
or Facebook group, or a club, please mention
that this is coming and steer your fellow hams
to that. And then, Neil, to you. Thank you for
having me on. Congratulations on nearing that
200 episode mark. Very impressive. And thank
you for the work that you do with the Youth on
the Air. I just heard about it from Sterling.
this year and real excited about where that will
go. So thank you for doing that. You're very
welcome and thank you for helping us out with
some numbers to help out our young hams over
in Europe and also in planning things over here
on this side of the pond. Thanks so much for
all you do, and let's go through the website
again one more time just to make sure everybody
knows where to find this next month. Yep. It's
going to be www .radiosoth. That's Radio Sierra
Oscar Tango Hotel dot org. I got that from Radio
State of the Hobby. You can always just go to
Google. and type in radio state of the hobby
you'll find it and I have a link on my QRZ profile
as well. All right, well thank you so much for
coming on the show and have a great time traveling
and we look forward to seeing the survey coming
out here in about a month. My pleasure, thank
you. All right, well that is a wrap for this
week's edition of HamTalk Live. Thanks to my
guest Dustin Thomas, N8RMA, and everybody out
there in cyberspace for listening and typing
in. And I invite you back next Thursday night
at 9 p .m. Eastern Time when, yes, it's episode
number 200. And we're gonna give away a bunch
of prizes and take a look back at the first 199
episodes. So make sure you come back to HamTalkLive
.com next Thursday night and we're going to take
your calls. We're not going to have a guest next
week. We're going to play some clips from Previous
episodes and we're gonna take some calls to give
away some stuff So we're gonna have a lot of
fun with that next week. So be sure to tune in
for that Do you want to make one final announcement
here? I was emailing with Carol Perry WB to MGP
And she wanted to let everybody know that she
is accepting nominations now for the Young Ham
Lends a Hand contest. This is an annual contest
that's given away at the Dayton Hamvention Youth
Forum for any young ham, and that's defined as
age 19 or younger, who has demonstrated some
basic tenets of service and volunteerism. So
you can nominate somebody for that award. It
could be somebody who helps recruit and mentor
other young people, helps at local community
events, or helps some way with the elderly or
military personnel in the community. Anything
that they do that lends a hand. And they're a
ham. Those are the people that she's looking
for. So all nominations can be sent to WB2MGP,
that's Whiskey Bravo 2, MikeGolfPapa at gmail
.com before the end of April. And the winner
will be announced at her youth forum at the Dayton
Hamvention. And that's a $100 prize for the young
ham so Make sure you get your nominations in
for that and also if you like ham talk live if
you like the show here Please leave us a review
that that really helps us out. So That's gonna
wrap it up for tonight. So this is Neil rap WB9
VPG saying seven to three Seven five and may
the good DX be yours Well you came right back
to my secure call Your readability five and strength
nine You never once mentioned your weather at
all And I didn't mention mine We talked and talked
for hours and hours I completely forgot you're
a ham I don't know your power or the height of
your tower Frankly I don't give a damn Your 73's
to you and your family I'll be seeing you further
down the line Your 73's to you and your family
I'll be seeing you further down the line