Today is a great day. Amateur Radio has a new radio club made by the youth, for the youth:
https://yarc.world/
That’s David, KD2OAH , who posted this thread on reddit. Unsurprisingly, some hams were iffy and curmedgoney about the idea of a Discord (which is cancer, by the way, see below or here 🙄) when there’s already a reddit IRC. He also initially wanted it to be for Young Hams on Long Island, NY, but seeing that there was 1.) there’s probably not a lot of young hams on Long Island and 2.) probably no discord for young people in ham radio at all and, I asked him, among others, to extend it to the whole ham-o-sphere. That lead to the creation of the Young Hams discord chat. It was way more popular than David thought, currently at 70 active members (and 200 members total), dozens of chat rooms, a few voice chat rooms, a gaming hams spinoff and it’s all almost too hard to keep up with at times, which is a great thing.
There are several youth oriented US radio clubs and organizations [1][2][3][4] but they’ve all been created by older hams as an initiative to attract youth into the hobby1. They have served their purpose well, as now the youth are beginning to form their own clubs.
There is no hard and fast age rule: I’m 26, and some of our members are in their late 30s. Most members are either in high school or college.
If you don’t remember the cold war, are two standard deviations less than the mean age of radio amateurs, or are a strong supporter of youth in the hobby, then you are welcome to join. YARC doesn’t discriminate, but maybe don’t go on rants starting with ‘BACK IN MY DAY….’
And all political discussion can be held in #politics.
Many more cool things to come soon!
🆒
1. Youngsters on the Air (YOTA) is the only other club I know of that was started by and for young hams. It’s centered around IARU Region 1 – Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Northern Asia.↩
