Walk into almost any ham radio club meeting and count the people under 40. You probably won’t need a second hand. I’ve sat in those rooms, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not a problem.
The Clubs Are Doing This to Themselves
The usual explanation is that young people don’t care about radio. I don’t buy it. Young people are all over radio. They’re just not doing it in a rented community room on a Tuesday night, sitting through 40 minutes of treasurer’s reports and old business.
Most club meetings are built for the people already in them. Same agenda, same faces, same jokes about “kids and their phones.”
If your club’s idea of outreach is a table at Field Day, you’re not recruiting, you’re waiting.
I covered the broader list of club problems in What’s Wrong With Amateur Radio Clubs in 2026. This one is about who’s missing from the room.
GMRS and Mesh Are the New Front Door
Here’s where the younger crowd actually went: GMRS, Meshtastic, and MeshCore.
GMRS is one fee, no test, and the whole family is covered. Meshtastic and MeshCore run on cheap license-free LoRa boards you can flash in an evening. Nobody has to pass an exam or ask permission from a room full of strangers.
The upside is real. The barrier to entry is almost zero, and people who would never have touched a radio are on the air and having a good time. That’s ham radio’s old promise, delivered by a different door.
The downside is real too. Most of these users are running their radios blind. Somebody else programmed the channels, or they loaded a file from a forum. They couldn’t tell you why one channel is on UHF and another is on VHF, or what makes HF a completely different animal. Mesh teaches you to text over RF. GMRS skips the theory entirely. You can spend years in both and never learn how any of it works.
Talking on pre-programmed frequencies is fun, and I’m not knocking it. But knowing how to set up your own radio, why your antenna matters, and how signals actually travel on different bands is what keeps you on the air when the plan changes.
I don’t see these as competition. I see them as a feeder system that clubs are ignoring.
The Baofeng Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Cheap Baofengs did more to put radios in people’s hands than any recruiting campaign ever has. As a Volunteer Examiner, I’ve met plenty of new hams who started with one.
It also created a huge population of people transmitting on ham frequencies with no license at all. I see it constantly in two communities I’m part of: the Jeep and off-road crowd, and the gun and prepper crowd. Trail groups hand out simplex frequencies like they’re CB channels. Prepper forums recommend a Baofeng as a line item in a bug-out bag.
I’m glad they’re on the radio. I mean that. But “I’ll only use it in an emergency” falls apart fast. A radio you’ve never legally transmitted on is a radio you don’t know how to use. You don’t know the repeaters, the offsets, the local nets, or who’s actually listening.
The Technician exam is 35 multiple choice questions, and studying for it covers exactly what most of these users are missing. Get the license. You’ll stop looking over your shoulder, and you’ll be far more useful when it counts.
What I Think Needs to Change
Clubs need to go where these people already are. Show up at the trailhead. Host a mesh node build night. Run an exam session at the range or the off-road meetup. Help people program the cheap radio they already own.
And if you’re under 40, running a mesh node or a Baofeng on the trail, you’re already most of the way to being a ham. Finish the job. Then show up at a club meeting and make it better. We need you more than you need us.