I’m an accidental Board member of the Mount Baker Amateur Radio Club and thus I’m part of the planning for future meetings of the club, so now I’m paying a bit more attention to the relevance of Amateur Radio clubs and their meetings.

Thus the following two mentions combined in my mind:

Donald Rotolo N2IRZ commenting on Zero Retries 0135 (emphasis added):

You know, when I go to the chess club, we play chess. At the bridge club, we play bridge. At the beer brewing club, we don’t brew, but we do sample and comment on members’ beers. But at the ham club, all we do is talk. A recent topic at the meeting was “how to prepare for being a SK”. Wow, that really brought the kids in.

Ham clubs need to play radio at their meetings. Solder fumes should be common. How to use a multimeter. And so on…

Combine that with this quote I’ve been citing for practically the entire life of Zero Retries:

The Universal Purpose of Ham Radio is to have fun messing around with radios.

Bob Witte K0NR

Very soon, this will be my primary metric of how useful / fun / interesting / relevant an Amateur Radio group or associated meeting is:

Do we… play with RADIOS… at the meeting?

If we aren’t playing with radios at an Amateur Radio meeting, we (Amateur Radio) are not making use of the singular, unique advantage that we have over every other technical hobby and associated meetings - we Amateur Radio Operators can play, knowledgeably, with radios - and have fun with them.

If, as N2IRZ says, we’re just talking, then we’re doing it wrong.