Something I’ve seen multiple times in ham (radio amateur) communities, is the pervasiveness of saying something is “cheating”.
Oh, you’re using FT8? That’s cheating. DMR? That’s cheating. And so on, you get the gist.
But you know what? I don’t care.
The main goal of a hobby is to have fun, and radio is not exempt.
I’m having fun doing contacts over DMR, so are plenty of people using FT8 or other digital modes.
Trying to push some “pure” version of the hobby is why it’s dying. If your fun is doing contacts on CW, great; just stop trying to gate the hobby for others that have fun in different ways.
Hell, being nice is how you get others interested into new things. Make people interested in what you think is cool, instead of screaming at them for doing it “wrong”. Unsurprisingly (and sadly), this applies to a ton of other hobbies as well.
Luckily, most of my contacts with the ham community have been great so far. My club is filled with great people who will just experiment with about anything, and the contacts done over the radio itself were mostly done with really kind people.
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