Interim analysis: the amateur radio media

2.4Interim analysis: the amateur radio media

2.4.1The radio medium as seen through the current results on community endurance

Communication on the medium cultivated by radio amateurs has brevity as its norm. Authors like (Muramatsu and Ackerman 1998) would characterize interaction on the medium as social without necessarily being sociable, similar to the players in their game MUD. This, then, would not be an incentive for an enduring community (indeed, players do not stay in the respective game MUD more than 6 months on the average).

The channels provided by the communication medium are often unreliable, or, if they are reliable they are made unreliable by the members like in the experiment we encountered, and in many others. Due to the finite nature of the radio frequency range, the number of channels offered by the medium is severely limited. Oppositely, Mynatt et al. (1998) ask for the network community system to be optimised for predictability and to offer multiple modalities (page 138).

Members can conceal their presence, listening without contributing, which authors like Kollock and Smith would call “lurking” and see it as a cause of what Ostrom calls “the tragedy of the commons”: making use of other’s contribution without contributing oneself, leading in the end to individualistic acts that bring about the community decay. Since others can conceal their identity as well, operators have to do a lot of listening to understand who is already present (or at least, who wish to reveal their presence), in contrast with the “awareness-richness” principle of Mynatt et al. (1997, 1998). Furthermore, authors like Sproull and Kiesler (1991) would notice that there is a lack of backchannel cues in the unidirectional (simplex) radio communication, in a similar manner with plain text, and one would be tempted to conclude that, like in text-based ‘networks’, only weak social ties will form.

Judged from these perspectives, amateur radio communication should not have lead to the well-established community that we know about. Even if the strong rules provide for a good management of the medium (no matter if we see the status of these rules as tacit code of conduct or as state laws), the communication on the radio bands cannot bring the ‘social ties’ and the social debate that the virtual community enthusiasts are hoping for. To understand the endurance of the Ham community, we must look outside the radio medium and see how the radio medium is used in concert with other media.

2.4.2Communication and experimentation media

I even dictated schematics on the radio wave.

In most cases, when something needs to be debated, when transceiver schematics need to be copied or discussed, it is much easier to wait for the regular (e.g. weekly) radio club meeting than to try to use the local repeater.

Beginners draw specific advantages from the radio club meeting: they have an opportunity to interact and ask questions while they may not yet be able to transmit on radio due to not having passed the license exam, possessing a receiver but not a transmitter, or simply not having dared yet to press the emission button. It is technically easier to listen than to talk on radio, also because procuring or building a receiver requires much less effort than having a transmitter.

However complex the uses of the radio medium, it is clear by now that we cannot treat it in isolation from other media used by the community. We have already seen some of the roles of the face-to-face radio club meeting. Hams make use of several other media: post to send material such as QSLs between clubs or between national federations, magazines to publish important trends, achievements and designs, etc.

One of the member’s ‘business card’ comes to illustrate the variety of communication media used. The card has several elements that made it stand out from common cards: first, the call sign is written under the name. The call sign reveals a lot of information in itself due to the data that is officially attached to it: nickname, location, radio club address, etc. Besides the normal address and phone contacts, a variety of other modalities were indicated: e-mail, fax, telex. While personal e-mail may not be so rare today, it was quite rare for a Romanian at the time the card came into the corpus of study material (1997). Even today, the form yo3ghi@internetdomain stands out, emphasizing the identity of the owner as a radio amateur.

The early adoption of new communication media, the openness for communication in any available medium may come as a surprise at first sight. Indeed a community outsider might assume that, since they are passionate about the radio medium, Hams should be proud about using only radio. However, having learned more about the nature of the communication on radio, we can now make a difference between what, for Hams, is a communication medium and what is an experimentation medium. One can experiment with his equipment searching for better ways to tune it or for radical new ways to construct it or one can search for other members who can provide opportunities for interesting connections. All the Ham efforts finalize on the radio medium, but other media are skilfully used and combined to accomplish the final achievements on radio.

That is not to say that radio only carries Ham experiments. The repeater connections are often ‘lucrative’, featuring e.g. members looking for each other to deal with ongoing matters of interest for the local Ham community such as managing common equipment, like the repeater itself. Hearing somebody on the repeater also denotes their availability for radio matters, which is one more reason to prefer the repeater instead of e.g. the phone (other reasons are small cost, testing the transceiver, testing the repeater). Also, radio is also regularly used as a broadcast medium on country-level reliable SW frequencies to transmit community news in bulletins called “QTC”. Of course, after the bulletin listeners can start QSOs to comment upon the news, or take advantage of each other’s presence to (shortly) exchange personal news.

As a result of this interim analysis, our approach to understanding community endurance will shift its focus from radio communication to amateur radio work in general, keeping in mind the often experimental character of radio connection work. In the next section, we will consider more analytically aspects of learning, experimentation, research, and ‘never-endingness’ in the Ham community. We will then attempt an interpretation of such aspects that is thought to provide a better understanding of community endurance.