There's a meme in ham radio that's been around over half a century that "ham radio is dying woe is me". Its funny reading impassioned letters to the editor in

There's a meme in ham radio that's been around over half a century that "ham radio is dying woe is me". Its funny reading impassioned letters to the editor in 1950 about this being the last generation of operators, nobody new will ever enter the hobby, etc. Its useful for non-hams to know this is a very old and unkillable meme. There are other long lived memes in ham radio such as its impossible to build equipment at home anymore, its impossible to install/solder whatever connector everyone is using at this time (anderson powerpole for DC, PL-259 RF connectors, hardline connectors, etc), its impossible to do surface mount at home, my antenna system is great but anyone who spent less than me has a "compromise antenna" because they didn't spend as much as me, all frequency bands above which I operate are line of sight only (no matter if that's 80 meter phone band or 47 GHz the ops say it the same way). There's been trolling on the voice band segments of 80 and 20 meters since at least the 50s. Another popular meme is ham radio might be an infinitely large map to explore for a lifetime but my favorite activity is "real ham radio" with a side dish of the map may be infinitely large but how far I've gotten, no matter how small, is as large as the whole thing is. Hams do have amateur physicists who understand radio propagation vs the ionosphere as well as any professional, but there's probably two guys disseminating pure bro-science for every reality based amateur physicist, I donno if broscience counts as a meme, I guess so. There are a lot of weird memes about age and ham radio because to some extent money and time result in a longer ranged station, therefore most of the guys you'll talk to have the longest ranged most expensive stations therefore you'll get the peculiar idea that all hams are 70, whereas what it really means is if you spend a lifetime building up your station you tend to end up with a really impressive station just before you die. I refer to the 50s alot above not because it started then, but as a third generation ham, my ancestors had a lot of old magazines and books to read when I was growing up. The hobby mostly being male and often transmitted from father to son is highly susceptible to the overall cultural trends WRT single parenthood and boys growing up without male role models.