The newest trend in American communication isn’t another smartphone from Apple or Google but one of the elder statesmen of communication: Ham radio licenses are at an all time high, with over 700,000 licenses in the United States, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
Ham radio first took the nation by storm nearly a hundred years ago. Last month the FCC logged 700,314 licenses, with nearly 40,000 new ones in the last five years. Compare that with 2005 when only 662,600 people hammed it up and you’ll see why the American Radio Relay League
— the authority on all things ham — is calling it a “golden age.”
“Over the last five years we’ve had 20-25,000 new hams a year,” Allen Pitts, a spokesman for the group, told FoxNews.com.
The unusual slang term — a “ham” is more properly known as an amateur radio operator — described a poor operator when the first wireless operators started out in the early 1900s. At that time, government and coastal ships would have to compete with amateurs for signal time, because stations all battled for the same radio wavelength. Frustrated commercial operators called the amateurs “hams” and complained that they jammed up the signal.
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/11/17/radio-days-are-back-ham-radio-licenses-at-all-time-high/