Is Ham Radio Dying? What the Numbers Actually Say

An opinion on the changing face of amateur radio, what the statistics actually show, and why a quieter repeater does not necessarily mean a dying hobby.

Spend enough time around amateur radio and eventually you will hear it:

"Ham radio is dying."

The repeaters are quiet. Club meetings are not as full as they used to be. Nobody builds anything anymore. Young people are not interested. FT8 is not really communicating. Hotspots are not radio. The Internet ruined everything.

I understand where some of that sentiment comes from.

In fact, some of it is true.

Amateur radio has some legitimate problems, and pretending otherwise does not do the hobby any favors. But I think we often confuse change with death.

When you actually start looking at the numbers, a much more interesting picture emerges.

First, What Does "Dying" Mean?

That is really the question.

If we are talking about declining membership in traditional amateur radio organizations, there is evidence for it.

If we are talking about an aging population, we have a legitimate problem.

If we are talking about quiet repeaters and struggling local clubs, those concerns are real in many communities.

But if we are talking about amateur radio as a whole, the evidence becomes much more complicated.

U.S. Amateur Radio Licensees

ARRL's historical figures document the growth from 285,000 U.S. amateurs in 1971 to more than 700,000 forty years later. ARRL reported the 700,000 milestone in 2011.

The numbers continued climbing after that and reached a modern high above 750,000 before beginning to decline.

That recent decline matters.

We should not hide it. But neither should we forget that many of the decades we nostalgically describe as amateur radio's glory days had hundreds of thousands fewer licensed amateurs than we have today.

There is an important caveat here too.

The U.S. population grew substantially during the same period. A ten-year FCC license also does not tell us whether someone actually turns on a radio.

License totals are not activity totals. Still, they certainly do not tell a simple story of a hobby disappearing.

There Is Real Ammunition for the Other Side

If we are going to have this conversation seriously, we should not cherry-pick numbers.

ARRL Membership Has Declined

ARRL membership provides one of the clearer warning signs.

That is a real decline. ARRL reported 156,475 members in its 2010 Annual Report, and the 2024 Annual Report reported 137,114.

It deserves attention. But it also raises an important question:

Does declining participation in a traditional amateur radio organization mean amateur radio itself is declining, or does it mean the way amateurs organize and participate is changing?

The answer may be some of both.

We Are Getting Older

The demographic problem also should not be dismissed.

Spend enough time at hamfests, club meetings, and amateur radio breakfasts and it is not difficult to see that a substantial portion of the active amateur population is older.

Precise national statistics on the average age of an active amateur are surprisingly difficult to establish reliably, so I am hesitant to repeat dramatic numbers floating around the Internet as fact.

But the underlying concern is legitimate.

We need younger operators. We need new licensees to become active operators. We need Elmers. We need clubs where someone who just passed their Technician exam actually wants to come back.

And we need to preserve decades of technical knowledge before we lose it.

If that is what someone means when they say amateur radio is dying, I am listening.

But that is still not the whole story.

People Are Still Walking Through the Door

ARRL reported that new-license volume through its VEC increased 23% in 2024, while upgrade volume increased 12% over the previous year in its 2024 Annual Report.

So maybe one of our biggest questions should not simply be:

"How do we get people licensed?"

Maybe it should also be:

"What happens to them after we do?"

Getting somebody to memorize enough material to pass a Technician exam is not the same thing as bringing them into amateur radio.

Someone has to show them what they can actually do with that license.

And today, the answer to that question is enormous.

We Are Not All Standing in the Same Room Anymore

Forty years ago, if you wanted to find amateur radio activity, you generally knew where to look.

HF phone. CW. The local repeater. A club meeting. Maybe packet.

Those things still exist, and I have enormous respect for them. But amateur radio did not stop there.

Today one ham might be working CW with a homebrew QRP rig while another is running FT8. Someone else is activating a park. Another operator is talking through DMR. Someone is working satellites. Another is decoding telemetry with an SDR. Someone is experimenting with microwave. Another is running APRS, Winlink, or VARA.

Someone is designing an antenna. Someone is writing DSP software. Someone is restoring a 50-year-old radio. Someone else is figuring out how to make a computer and a radio do something neither was originally designed to do.

We did not necessarily lose all the activity.

We fragmented it across an enormous hobby.

Field Day Tells an Incredible Story

One of the most interesting comparisons I found came from Field Day.

Look at the change in digital QSOs:

Between 2000 and 2025, reported digital Field Day contacts increased by roughly 2,700% according to ARRL Field Day results.

If that were the entire story, someone might reasonably conclude that computers killed traditional amateur radio.

Except look at CW:

After 25 years of smartphones, FT8, SDR, digital voice, high-speed Internet, and practically every other supposed threat to traditional amateur radio, operators still made 461,289 CW contacts during Field Day 2025.

And another 451,662 phone contacts.

CW apparently has not received the memo that it died.

The more interesting story is this:

Digital grew enormously without making traditional operating disappear.

Amateur radio added another table.

DMR Is a Perfect Example

DMR barely existed as an amateur radio activity during the era many people remember as the "good old days."

Then suddenly we had DMR repeaters, talkgroups, reflectors, BrandMeister, hotspots, and inexpensive digital handhelds.

By 2018, BrandMeister reported approximately 2,600 repeaters and 7,800 hotspots on its network. BrandMeister noted those figures during its third birthday update.

You can debate the role Internet linking should play in amateur radio. You can decide DMR is not your thing. You can hate hotspots.

That is fine.

But an operator using DMR does not cease to be an amateur radio operator simply because they are not talking on the analog repeater you remember being busy in 1995.

The same applies to Fusion, D-STAR, M17, and whatever comes next.

The audience did not necessarily disappear. Some of them changed rooms.

And Then FT8 Happened

Few things generate more "that is not real ham radio" conversations than FT8.

And I understand why. It does not look like traditional radio communication.

But that is also what makes it interesting.

Amateurs took computers, digital signal processing, precise timing, and weak-signal techniques and created an extraordinarily effective way to communicate under difficult conditions.

You do not have to enjoy FT8. But experimentation with modulation, propagation, weak signals, and computers sounds suspiciously like amateur radio to me.

And the activity is enormous.

During one September 2026 snapshot, PSK Reporter recorded more than 2.1 million FT8 reception reports in only two hours, along with WSPR, FT4, JS8, CW, and numerous other modes. PSK Reporter publishes current digital-mode reporting statistics.

Those are reception reports, not QSOs. That is an important distinction.

But that is also the point.

An enormous layer of amateur radio activity exists today that you will never hear by spinning the dial in SSB mode.

You can sit beside a silent speaker and conclude nothing is happening. Meanwhile, the spectrum may be full of signals your radio is not configured to hear.

Two Billion Contacts Do Not Look Like a Funeral

Then consider Logbook of The World.

LoTW did not begin operating until 2003.

By 2025, amateurs had submitted more than 2.1 billion QSO records. ARRL announced that milestone alongside its LoTW systems upgrade.

Two point one billion.

Of course, that is an accumulated total. It does not mean two billion contacts happened last year, nor does it tell us how many unique operators remain active.

But LoTW is also only one logging system. It does not include every QRZ log, paper log, N1MM database, N3FJP file, Log4OM record, DXKeeper database, or casual repeater conversation.

There is an extraordinary amount of amateur radio activity being generated.

We are just measuring it differently now.

Then There Is POTA

Parks on the Air might be one of the best examples of what modern amateur radio actually looks like.

POTA combines something extremely traditional with something extremely modern.

Take a radio somewhere. Put up an antenna. Make contacts.

That is about as old-school as amateur radio gets.

Now add lightweight lithium batteries, portable SDR-based radios, GPS, smartphones, online spotting, digital logging, and a worldwide awards infrastructure.

Reported POTA activity:

That is roughly a 43% increase in annual QSOs in two years, according to POTA News.

And this activity is not virtual.

Somebody has to go somewhere. Somebody has to set up a station. Somebody has to put up an antenna.

RF still has to leave it. Propagation still matters. Noise still matters. Antenna efficiency still matters.

And sooner or later that perfectly tuned portable antenna that worked yesterday will decide it hates you today.

That is ham radio.

The Traditionalists Matter

Defending modern amateur radio does not require dismissing traditional amateur radio.

Quite the opposite.

I want the person who can build an amplifier from components. I want the person who understands why an antenna works instead of simply knowing which button activates the tuner.

I want CW operators. I want antenna experimenters. I want people who can troubleshoot a radio with a schematic. I want people restoring Collins, Heathkit, Drake, and old Yaesu equipment.

I want someone who knows what happens inside a superheterodyne receiver.

I want the person who can explain why the smoke came out of the transistor.

Because once that knowledge disappears, getting it back is not easy.

If we lose that part of amateur radio, that actually would be something worth mourning.

But I also want that person sitting beside the 17-year-old who just figured out GNU Radio.

Because they have something to teach each other.

Maybe "Building" Changed Too

I sometimes hear that hams do not build things anymore.

Maybe we are defining building too narrowly.

In 1975, experimentation might have meant designing an oscillator, winding coils, etching a circuit board, or building an amplifier.

Those things still happen.

But today an amateur might also:

• Design an SDR application.
• Write DSP code.
• Build a digital hotspot.
• Create an APRS tracker.
• Design a microwave data link.
• Build a satellite ground station.
• Experiment with LoRa.
• Design a PCB around a modern RF chipset.
• Build an automated propagation monitor.
• Write open-source radio software.

The tools changed.

The instinct did not.

The homebrewer of 1975 and the amateur writing DSP code in 2026 may have more in common than either realizes.

They are both looking at technology and asking:

"I wonder what I can make this thing do?"

That question may be one of the purest expressions of amateur radio there is.

Maybe We Are Measuring the Wrong Things

If your measurement of amateur radio's health is how many people check into the local two-meter net on Tuesday night, you might conclude the hobby is dying.

If it is attendance at your club meeting, you might reach the same conclusion.

If it is ARRL membership, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned.

If it is the average age of the people walking around the hamfest, we absolutely have work to do.

If it is U.S. license growth over the last few years, there are warning signs there too.

We should not ignore any of them.

But zoom out.

Look at POTA. Look at Field Day. Look at FT8. Look at DMR. Look at LoTW. Look at satellites. Look at SDR. Look at digital voice. Look at weak-signal experimentation. Look at amateur software development.

Look at the people designing antennas, restoring vintage radios, learning CW, writing code, carrying radios into parks, and trying things that probably will not work just to find out if maybe they will.

That is amateur radio too.

So, Is Ham Radio Dying?

I do not think that question has a simple yes-or-no answer.

Some parts of amateur radio are declining.

Some are growing.

Some are changing.

Some traditional organizations are struggling while entirely new communities are appearing.

We have an aging population while new people continue getting licensed.

We have quiet analog repeaters while digital networks connect thousands of stations.

We have declining institutional membership while millions of portable contacts are being made from parks.

We have people mourning the loss of homebrewing while another generation is designing SDRs, writing DSP code, and building digital radio systems.

And maybe we are doing a decent job getting people licensed but a lousy job showing them what comes next.

Those are conversations worth having.

Because saying "ham radio is dying" is easy.

Figuring out what is actually happening is much more useful.

The activity did not vanish.

It spread out.

Amateur radio used to be a fairly large room containing a handful of different tables.

Today it is an enormous convention center.

Some of the old tables have fewer people sitting at them. Some may eventually disappear entirely, and that is worth caring about.

But somebody also opened a hundred new rooms.

And maybe instead of standing beside our favorite empty chair declaring that everyone has gone home, we ought to walk around and see what they are building.

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Opinion by R. Christopher Corbett, W0WC

Published by LZARC