Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series.
This is the last stop on the timeline, and it’s the only one without a fixed date, because it’s still being written. Amateur radio today is a genuine mashup of every era covered in this series: century-old HF DXing, postwar VHF repeaters, personal radio services running alongside it on nearby frequencies, and three competing digital voice standards that still don’t fully talk to each other.
Roughly 775,000 licensed hams in the US
As of the most recent FCC data, there are approximately 775,000 active licensed amateur radio operators in the United States, and around 3 million worldwide. US licensing has been on a slow, steady upward trend since the FCC dropped the Morse code requirement in 2007, a change that removed the single biggest barrier to entry the hobby had.
Three license classes, no code required
Today’s US licensing structure has settled into three active classes: Technician, General, and Amateur Extra, with the old Novice and Advanced classes closed to new applicants but still renewable for existing holders. None of the current classes require a Morse code test, a dramatic shift from the 5, 10, and 20 word per minute requirements that defined licensing for most of this timeline. Roughly half of all US licensees hold Technician, the entry-level class, with General and Amateur Extra splitting most of the rest.
HF, VHF/UHF, analog, and digital, all still active
Nothing on this timeline actually died off. HF DXing is as active as it was after 1923, just now split between traditional SSB and CW and the FT8 activity that dominates so much band space. Local VHF and UHF repeaters still run analog FM the way they have since the 1970s, alongside DMR, D-STAR, and System Fusion repeaters that never fully merged into one interoperable standard. GMRS, FRS, and MURS keep growing in parallel as the accessible, license-light options for family and preparedness use.
New layers have joined the mix
A few genuinely newer developments don’t fit neatly into any earlier chapter of this timeline. Software-defined radios, exemplified by gear like my own IC-7300 Mark II, moved most of a receiver’s filtering and demodulation from analog hardware into software, making capabilities that once required expensive, dedicated equipment available in mainstream radios. Parks on the Air (POTA) and Summits on the Air (SOTA) turned portable operating into structured activities with their own award programs, driving a wave of interest in lightweight field gear and efficient portable antennas. And mesh networking, through projects like Meshtastic, has brought a genuinely new communication paradigm to the amateur and license-free space, using low-power LoRa radios to relay text messages and data across a self-forming network of nodes rather than a traditional point-to-point or repeater-based link.
Cheap handhelds changed who gets licensed
Inexpensive Chinese-made handhelds, the kind that cost less than a dinner out, have had an outsized effect on who enters the hobby and why. A lot of new Technician licensees today are getting licensed specifically so they can legally use a cheap dual-band HT they already bought, rather than pursuing the license first and the radio second the way earlier generations of hams typically did. That’s a meaningfully different on-ramp into the hobby than existed for most of this timeline.
Preparedness has become a bigger driver
A meaningful share of new hams today aren’t getting licensed for DX chasing or contesting either. They’re coming in through EmComm, ARES, and general family preparedness, drawn by the fact that amateur radio keeps working when cell networks and internet infrastructure don’t. Between the cheap-HT effect and the preparedness effect, the profile of a typical new ham looks noticeably different than it did even twenty years ago, and it’s shaping what gear and content people look for.
What hasn’t changed
Go back to 1901 and the core idea is the same one that got Marconi and a handful of obsessive tinkerers building spark-gap transmitters in the first place: figuring out how to reliably send a signal from one point to another, and doing it because you want to understand how it works, not because someone’s paying you to. That part of the hobby hasn’t moved an inch in 125 years, even as everything around it has.
Sources
Previous: 2017, when FT8 changed HF forever. Or head back to the full timeline.