Part of our Start Here: A New Ham’s Guide to Getting on the Air guide.
The weekly net is one of the oldest traditions in amateur radio. Nearly every club runs one. Tune in on the right night and you’ll hear the net control station call for check-ins, work through the roster, read a few announcements, and sign off. It’s familiar, it’s comfortable, and for a lot of clubs it’s the main thing they do on the air.
Here’s the uncomfortable question nobody wants to ask: what is the net actually accomplishing in 2026?
What Nets Were Originally For
I’m still pretty new to ham radio, but as I understand (based on conversations and my research) club nets didn’t start as a social roll call. They had a job.
In the early days, a net was a scheduled meeting on the air with a real purpose. Traffic nets moved actual messages across the country, relaying formal written traffic from one operator to the next long before email existed. Emergency and public service nets organized operators during disasters, disciplining the chaos of a crowded frequency so that critical information could get through. Nets were where you practiced net discipline, learned to pass traffic accurately, tested whether your station could actually reach the people you’d need to reach, and found out if your gear worked when it counted.
The check-in wasn’t the point. It was the roll call before the real work started. The net was a drill, a training ground, and a readiness check all at once.
What Most Nets Have Become
Fast forward to today and the drill has quietly turned into a ritual with the training removed.
A typical modern net goes like this. Net control calls for check-ins. Stations check in. Net control acknowledges each one. Maybe there are a few announcements about the upcoming club breakfast or a hamfest. Then everyone signs off, having accomplished roughly nothing beyond confirming they exist.
There’s no traffic being passed. No skills being practiced. No scenario being run. No teaching happening. The net has become a way to say “I’m here” once a week, and little else. It persists because it always has, not because anyone can point to what it does.
And that’s the real problem. Nets haven’t innovated in years. The format is frozen. The same script runs week after week, month after month, and the hobby has moved on around them while the net stayed exactly where it was.
The Engagement Problem
A ritual that never changes stops engaging people, and nets are a textbook example.
If the entire experience is checking in and waiting your turn to be acknowledged, there’s no reason to be an active participant. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to prepare. You don’t learn anything you didn’t already know. Newer hams tune in a few times, realize nothing is being taught and nothing is happening, and quietly stop showing up. Who can blame them?
A net should be a reason to get on the air and get better. Instead, for most clubs, it’s a formality that asks nothing of the people participating and gives them little in return.
The Part That Should Worry Preparedness-Minded Hams
A lot of people get into amateur radio specifically for emergency preparedness. When the grid goes down, when cell networks are overloaded or dead, when things go sideways, radio is supposed to be the fallback that still works. That’s a big part of the appeal, and it’s a legitimate one.
So if testing your gear and your knowledge is supposedly one of the objectives of a net, here’s the hard truth: most weekly nets don’t prepare anyone for an actual emergency.
Think about what a real SHTF scenario looks like. Infrastructure is degraded or gone. The repeater you rely on every week might be down, out of power, or off the air entirely. Now you have to reach people simplex, or on a different band, or through a path you’ve never used. You need to know your equipment cold. You need to be able to change frequencies, adjust power, switch bands, and reprogram on the fly with nobody there to help you.
A net that only ever runs the same easy check-in on the same reliable repeater never tests any of that. It gives people a false sense of readiness. They think they’re prepared because they check in every week, when in reality they’ve never once operated under conditions that resemble an emergency.
The Elephant in the Room: People Can’t Program Their Own Radios
Here’s the thing that should stop every club in its tracks.
A large number of net regulars cannot program their own radios. Someone else did it for them. A well-meaning club member sat down, punched in the repeater, set the offset and tone, saved the memory channels, and handed the radio back ready to go. The owner keys up every week, checks in, and has never touched the programming themselves.
That’s fine right up until it isn’t.
Because if the balloon goes up and that repeater fails, these operators are stuck. They can’t add a new frequency. They can’t switch to simplex. They can’t program in a different repeater across town. They can’t adapt to any situation that wasn’t preloaded into their radio by someone else. The one skill that actually matters in an emergency, the ability to reconfigure your own station to reach someone, is the one skill they never learned.
They own the gear. They have the license. They check in every week. And in the exact moment radio is supposed to save the day, they’d be holding a brick they don’t know how to operate.
That is a training failure, and it’s one the weekly net is perfectly positioned to fix and simply doesn’t.
What a Net Could Be Instead
None of this means nets are worthless. It means the format has gone stale and needs to actually do its job again. A net that earned its place on the calendar might look like this.
It would rotate the repeater it uses, and occasionally run simplex, so operators learn what their stations can and can’t reach without the machine helping them.
It would include a short teaching segment every week. Five minutes on programming a memory channel by hand. A walkthrough of setting an offset and tone manually. A quick lesson on switching bands or adjusting power.
It would run occasional drills. “The repeater is down tonight, find me on simplex.” “Reprogram your radio right now to this new frequency and check back in.” Real scenarios that force people to touch their equipment and think.
It would make programming a rite of passage, not a favor. Every member should leave knowing how to configure their own radio from scratch, because the person who can’t do that isn’t actually ready for the thing they got licensed for.
The Bottom Line
The weekly net started as a drill and a readiness check. Somewhere along the way most of them became a comfortable roll call that teaches nothing, tests nothing, and prepares no one. Worse, they hand out a false sense of security to the exact people who got into this hobby to be ready when it matters.
If your net can’t teach a new ham to program their own radio, and can’t function the day the repeater goes dark, then it isn’t preparing anyone for anything. It’s just a habit.
The good news is that the fix is entirely in our hands. Nets can go back to being what they were meant to be. It just takes a club willing to make the net do real work again.