A friend of mine asked recently if perhaps our angst over ARRL was misguided. There is a segment of hams that will hate the ARRL for any reason, often stupid, irrelevant reasons. I still encounter people who are angry about incentive licensing or claim the ARRL is against CW despite running daily CW bulletins. Naturally we should be angry over nefarious activities like canning directors for questionable conflict of interest claims or running shadow boards, but perhaps the decline of ARRL and its membership numbers is just due to the overall decline in the number of people interested in participating in organizations, and out of their control. We see it everywhere, from churches, to fraternal community organizations, to ham clubs with many withering away due to lack of interest.

To an extent, I think he’s right. If you were a maker of buggy whips in the early 1900’s, your ox was undoubtedly going to get gored with the advent of the automobile. Amateur radio itself is in a bit of decline. If the demand for an organization to support something just isn’t there, there isn’t much an organization dedicated to that thing can do. But I’d also argue the answer is a bit more complicated and nuanced.

Let’s break down what ARRL is to people. I think there are two buckets: those who see it as a magazine and publication company / content provider and those who see it like the “NRA of amateur radio”.

From a magazine and publisher perspective, they have fallen behind. Magazines are dying and ARRL continues to hold tight to the “we publish a monthly periodical” way of publishing. They haven’t embraced any real sort of new electronic media; the app the publications are on is just a replacement for paper. Complicating this, there are a lot of members who feel stiffed they don’t get a paper copy in their hands each month, at least not without paying more for it. Another problem with ARRL’s magazine model and magazines in general is they just can’t compete with the breadth and timeliness of the Internet, like social media, groups, websites, or good ole email reflectors. Take me, for example. I like to build stuff. Is it likely the one article they’ll have in QST next month will strike my fancy? Maybe, but probably not. I’m on a few QRP Groups.io groups. I see several postings a week that interest me and often cause me to jot stuff in my design notebook. If I’m a creator and have some great new thing to show the world, am I going to wait six months for my article to get published? No, I’m going to get it out on the Internet in some form or fashion and interact with other like-minded people who want to talk about this new great thing. In the world of “ARRL is a magazine subscription”, they have fallen short, clinging to an old, outdated model.

ARRL could have also embraced and even owned amateur radio social media and integrated this in with a content publication strategy, but they totally missed the boat on this, too. The time to do this would have been back when QRZ.com changed from selling CDs to a Slashdot-clone amateur radio site and eHam was trying to be the same thing with a lousily-colored and formatted website. Both sites early on showed just how toxic mismanaged social media could be, and ARRL could have beat them all and done it much better. But they didn’t, and later they didn’t even attempt to have a notable, focused presence on social media like Facebook. They kept within their sandbox of QST and field staff shaking hands at dwindling hamfests.

Then there’s the segment that considers ARRL the NRA of amateur radio. They advocate, protect, lobby, and provide services. The NRA peddles fear, fear that “they” are going to take “your” guns away. It’s how they rile up and motivate membership and keep, or rather kept the dollars flowing in so Wayne LaPierre could live the good life. But beyond lobbying and money scandals they offer everything a gun owner might want. What does ARRL peddle? Preservation. They promise to preserve amateur radio and the status quo, and occasionally raise some funds with spectrum defense. Why does ARRL still run the antiquated NTS, or push emcomm so much? Why aren’t they really involved with digital standards or pushing open systems and software? It’s easy to do what you’ve been doing for decades, and hard to do something new. You can buy a brick paver with your name on it that will adorn the back patio at HQ, and will let future generations of hams know of your kind generosity long after you’re SK and forgotten. ARRL is like amateur radio formaldehyde. Ham radio may eventually die, but they’re going to keep it from rotting. However, it will smell a bit funky.

The Maker movement is the bridge to the future of amateur radio. Makers are tinkerers, like amateur radio used to be. They are essentially amateur radio operators without the radios, FCC licenses, and the “historical baggage” of their hobby, like amateur radio (we gotta do emcomm, “we provide a service to the public”, “we got to make up reasons to ham like ‘I need to collect all 50 states’ “, etc.). You look at their publications and websites and they’re just full of energy and ideas. Makers don’t need cringey magazine covers with a teenage girl awkwardly posing, touching the VFO knob of a rig she’s never used. They don’t have gatekeepers like amateur radio, where one has know some code to be a “real ham”. They don’t care if you have purple hair, or if you have an in-y or an out-y, or both. They don’t care if you sleep with someone with an in-y or an out-y. Or both. Interest and curiosity alone is enough to validate one as a Maker, and there’s no pecking order based on what tests you passed, how many 59s you exchange on a weekend and there are no “collect all X” of something as a rite of passage. Makers like new cutting-edge hardware and old, antiquated ("retro”) hardware just as much. They’ll even combine both and make things like a Raspberry Pi driving old Nixie tubes. Why? Because they can. Most makers may never have touched a ham radio, but on a philosophical level they get why one would want to pump Morse code through a satellite, or take four diodes, a DDS module, and an audio amp chip and make a direct conversion receiver. ARRL continues to this day to fail to recognize the opportunity we have with Makers.

While the changing winds over the decades may have made ARRL unneeded or obsolete, I’d still call what has happened a failure of leadership, and it was preventable. With a for-profit company there is a life cycle graph that looks something like a hill. Companies start up, grow in adolescence, mature and reach a peak, get over the hill, and later die. A skillful business leader will recognize where an organization is at in the cycle and “re-invent” the business after a peak to create a new upswing, and a new, higher peak. I think the same applies to a non-profit like ARRL.

The current CEO naturally can’t take all the blame, but he doesn’t seem too interested in righting the ship. We could probably trace ARRL failures in leadership all the way back to the 70s. In recent ARRL history there was only one innovator CEO, and he was unceremoniously canned. It was said he was unconventional and a bit disruptive; that was exactly what ARRL needed, and still needs today. While all ARRL CEOs were undoubtedly successful in business in their careers, I sense most were looking for a sort of “retirement position” as an ARRL CEO, pulling a paycheck but not having to really bust their butts or make waves. Until ARRL gets out of the business of preserving itself as an ongoing entity, the organization will continue its journey into irrelevancy