In January 2025, we launched our UK Amateur Radio Survey for 2025. We believe this to the be the largest survey of the UK community this year, and the results are out. We had a total of 855 responses.
Results Summary Video
We’ve released a short video covering the key findings of the survey, including an extract of us asking the key survey question at the RSGB’s 2025 AGM:
What are today’ amateur’s most common activities? Top 5:
- HF Operation
- VHF / UHF Operation
- Operating Portable
- Socialising / friendship
- Data Modes
How did respondents get into the hobby? Top 5:
- Always been interested in radio
- As a result of an interest in CB
- Shortwave Listener (SWL)
- Looking for a hobby
- I’m from an electronics background
What do today’s newcomers struggle with? Top 5:
- Nerves about operating
- Setting up an antenna
- Finding the money for equipment
- Working out which aspect of the hobby is best to start on first
- Choosing a transceiver
How do respondents rate key organisations?
| 5 (Highest) | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 (Lowest) | |
| Essex Ham | 62.9% | 22.2% | 8.5% | 2.6% | 3.7% |
| Other online groups | 25.7% | 36.6% | 28.8% | 6.6% | 2.3% |
| Local bricks-and-mortar club | 28.5% | 18.9% | 17.2% | 12.8% | 22.6% |
| RSGB in general | 19.3% | 29.7% | 27.3% | 9.9% | 13.9% |
| RSGB exams | 24.4% | 27.4% | 22.7% | 10.3% | 15.2% |
| Ofcom (amateur radio only) | 22.9% | 32.6% | 31.4% | 7.8% | 5.3% |
Download Survey Results
Download the full results as a PDF: Essex Ham Survey 2025 Results (PDF)
Got a comment on the survey results?
Add a comment below!
There’s an image problem in UK amateur radio. It’s not the young, lively hobby we see from the american youtubers, the UK is bogged down with old farts, particularly at the rsgb, who seem so stuck in the past that they think the hobby is still all about components, soldering projects, and deep electronics theory (not even just a general understanding of what components are and what they do. Oh no, it has to be properly assessed with calculations and circuits that the average ham will never need to know. When was the last time a ham sat down with a pencil and calculated a circuit – practically never. Even for projects, most of us are looking to follow a tutorial or a kit nowadays.
Imagine wanting to get into a photography club, but before you can get along and use your camera, you have to take 3 increasingly difficult exams on old historic technology before you’re welcome and can start to use your new equipment. The exams the are tired and outdated and irrelevant. They’re putting people off the hobby and actually stopping it from growing to any potential, because they want to keep people down and only allow the full licences to a chosen few.
They won’t even change. Where’s the modular exam system? where’s the release of the questions and answer database they hinted at? They don’t support people, they’re just happy to say rubbish like ” we’ve got an 80% pass rate” – what? So 20% of people walk away? and that’s ok? There should be a target of 100% – anyone that wants to get fully licensed should be able to, not just the few. Why set exams that are so difficult that they’re happy to see people fail. The exams belong in a dated era, before the internet, before YouTube, when you had to go to a college of a library for your knowledge. Nowadays we can just look things up, instantly on our phones. We shouldn’t need to memorize and prove so much before being awarded a licence.
There’s really poor support for the UK intermediate and full exams. Why? Because the average ham probably doesn’t know all the theory themselves. Making YouTube content for the full licences is too much hard work, nobody’s doing it.
Please help all those frustrated hams. No courses, no online tuition, no club support. What about us normal people, busy with kids and work, looking for a casual hobby, who aren’t physics geniuses, adjust want to operate in the hobby and enjoy it?
The UK rsgb should focus less on all the world war 2 history and codebreakers nonsense, and actually modernise with where the hobby is today, not where it was 50 years ago. And if they can’t provide decent resources, or get clubs to deliver the training, maybe it’s time they admit that the exams are bloated and outdated. Instead all we get is denial off them. For some reason they’re always on the defensive, they should be on our side. Our advocates. Delivering tuition and support, instead of looking like gatekeepers who are constantly against us
They don’t like criticism at RSGH HQ. They think the exams are perfect and look down on people who can’t achieve them. They’re not bothered if people walk away, and do nothing to support or retain the good ones.
You can literally have dozens of new fresh M7’s pass, they play with a few repeaters for a couple of months, then after a year you never hear or see off them again. There’s zero interest in continuing their development and clubs have no support from the RSGB in how to deliver this mammoth training of the full callsign.
The figures for M7 passes are totally biased – in my experience they’re made up of scout groups and other interest groups. In 2020, levels peaked at nearly 3000 new foundation licences issued. Where are they all now? By 2023, we see less than 200 full licences issued for the year. Of all the 15,000 licences issued between 2018 and 2023, only about 10% of those were Full. They really need to do something if 90% of people walk away from the hobby – we see it in the clubs anecdotally, and the numbers don’t lie either.
There’s over 400 clubs in the UK, we’re barely even qualifying one full licencee for every 2 clubs, and I imagine there are popular clubs training several candidates and most clubs gaining none that skew this too. When people go on about ‘back in my day’, they should reflect on the fact that we were registering nearly 8,000 full licences each year in the early 1980’s. Now, it’s about 200?
They don’t need a crystal ball to see that the numbers don’t add up to a sustainable hobby.
Give the average age of club members seems to be 60’s+, there isn’t much future proofing being thought out at the RSGB.
Instead of having the licences termed “Foundation”, “Intermediate”, and “Full”, they should be renamed “Class 1”, “Class 2”, “Class 3”.
This would remove the negative connotations of Foundation being somehow a junior/rookie license if people are happy to stay there. Intermediate has the connotations of being a transitional/not-quite-made-it-yet status. People can happily sit at their appropriate level without being dumbed down.
Also, get all classes of licence certified for use overseas so we can all take our kit on holiday and enjoy it.
Even their name is a dated relic – RSGB – it should be RSUK to reflect the inclusion of Wales and Scotland.
I vote Pete for RSGB president. He seems to ‘get it’. Why make this hobby so hard that so many people just fall away instead of growing in it.
We’ll be left with just fewer and fewer technical nerds that are able to pass the full exam, that the airwaves from the UK will be dead in a decade or two – and nothing is being done about this.
There seems to be such a huge technical learning curve between foundation and full, that people just drop off and feel unwelcome when they see the struggle to progress. Why does all that learning and extensive knowledge have to be examined to the Nth degree to progress – the joy of ham radio is all the learning along the way, for years and years after, of self training and learning.
It’s simply too hard for most ordinary people to get the golden ticket, and people aren’t able to achieve this in a reasonable time scale and give up. I’ve seen this time and time again.
We will inevitably see a decline in then number of specialist ham radio shops in the UK too as the old G’s go silent, because not enough foundation amateurs have need for any of the high power equipment because of their license conditions.
Cheap Chinese pricing (think g90) must have already dented sales. And I suspect the RSGB, in making exams so difficult, also means people don’t see the point in spending out on the higher power equipment.
I would suspect that most people just want to be operators these days. The days of construction are gone. The sooner the RSGB realise this the better. More people would be retained in the hobby, and it would be better for everyone (clubs, shops, and increased activity alike), if the exams were more achievable in a reasonable time scale.
Once the specialist shops close they’ll never come back. We’ll just be left with online storefronts for the Chinese outlets. Clubs will be a thing of the past too unless the RSGB see the error of their ways and kindle some enthusiasm back into newly licenced hams to retain them.
Even if critics say ‘ohh people want it easy these days’, or ‘back in my day it was harder’, well, if that’s the reality, then that’s the challenge. That’s the way the hobby has changed. If making it easier really is the only solution to deal with people’s busy modern lives, then so be it. What’s the alternative? A dying hobby? Dead airwaves? Clubs with no members left? The hobby left with just a few oddly satisfied sad hams sat in an empty room saying ‘well, at least we kept it difficult for newcomers’.
the hobby has always had – morse types, dxers, chatters, campers and social life & portable types. some have soldering irons and sheds, some rtty, atv, Z80, 8080,Mega328, amps, tuners, masts, wire, 807, 4CX250,640, 320, antennas, dipole, 1/4 wave, 1/2 wave, standing wave ,feedback,blue boxes, black boxes, even grey boxes ,modems, serial, parallel, verticaland horizontal, xyl’s,mates,friends, eproms, rams, usb and ESP…etc
it acommodates all, interests a lot of people world wide. Marvellous if you like it… chips and all, every one can play ! enjoy electronics
But you have to have rules and standards…
The hobby is indeed diverse, so why are the exams and training so focused on dated theory. It should be more focused on training people to be good ham operators, not electricians. So people can actually access the hobby you speak of, instead of putting them off.
There’s no training now like there used to be. What’s wrong with an open-book exam? Or a portfolio of coursework that gets assessed? Or something modular that can be submitted to an assessor in stages? Something people can study and get some feedback along the way- actually retaining people, and giving them little achievements in their studies. Why this stupid multiple choice system? I hate exams.
The problem is the RSGB is not fit for purpose. They pretend like it takes ages to change the system, so we never actually get anything moving. Stuck in the past with a bunch of old dinosaurs at the helm.
Get some new blood in there with some new ideas. Actually get ideas rolling, instead of being an old boys club run by a bunch of mumbling old farts.
@Noodle – I understand the RSGB is always looking for volunteers – loads of vacancies here: https://rsgb.org/main/about-us/volunteering-for-the-rsgb/
@Box.think.outside – Some sensible ideas, but remember we have a problem – most clubs have given up with in-person training and exams. Without them, where are we the candidates going to go, and who will train / assess them?
Without some serious rethinking at RSGB HQ I fear this is just the tip of the iceberg. We need ways to help people to level up and keep fostering continued interest in the hobby. We need more fully licensed hams, I don’t see any creative thinking coming out of the RSGB, just the same old dull executive board maintaining a failing status quo.
Maybe devolved assessment is the better way to go. Have clubs or elected officers able to assess people and grant them the ticket. Have elected rsgb-certified training officers who can assess a portfolio and sign them off their ticket. People can plod along with some coursework, submit it at the end, and then an assessor spends 1 hour at their leisure making sure it demonstrates competency. No different to the current time RSGB invigilators are giving up, without all the stilly Zoom nonsense.
The syllabus is already there. At the end of it, you’ve got a little bundle of 100 pages or so with diagrams, tables, maps, explanations, questions, mini essays, case study, presentations, etc. Training would be in the true spirit of self learning and development, rather than it is presently being a BS exam.
Yeh, the exams are just too hard. They don’t fit the modern world these days. The rsgb just look like relics of a dying hobby instead of making changes to develop newcomers.
At least the old G’s had courses they could go to. There isn’t much training offered for the youngsters these days, no wonder repeaters are dead and the airwaves are quiet.
There’s no courses nowadays for youngsters. I don’t really see the need to learn half the syllabus off by heart anyway, nobody needs to know all that to become a fully fledged operator. If we need to know something nowadays, we can just Google it. We don’t need to be examined on so much, it just puts people off growing in the hobby.
The full licence is enormous barrier that takes years to understand.
Seems more like the license is this end-goal in itself, rather than just being an administrative authorisation to start enjoying amateur radio.
Rather than people spending their efforts on air and fully active and included, they’re sat at home trying to get their heads around the hobby as it was in the 1970s. I’m a software developer, and I like to chat to people, what relevance does all the electronic components theory have to how I want to operate and develop community projects and interfaces with Pi and Arduinos?
The licences don’t train people to become good operators. They don’t teach operational etiquette. Foundation doesn’t even give people confidence to get on air.
The training is so weirdly focused on being a constructor that it fails in its objective to properly equip newcomers these days.
The hobby has changed, it’s an “operators hobby” now, and thank god. We have radios that far surpass what is capable of being constructed from components. It’s like trying to focus a photography hobby on dark rooms and film.
Get with the times and stop faffing about with all the electrical component theory focus like it’s a priority, people can deep dive into all that if it tickles them, but stop making the rest of us suffer it when we want to operate.
I agree with yours and the huge majority of comments previously made regarding the issue of going through the ludicrous hoops to obtain a Full Licence. I have no intention of, nor do I want to, open the backs of my expensive radio equipment just to mess about re-soldering something or re-jigging a perfectly made piece of electronic kit just for the sake of it. I am not an electrician, nor am I a radio technician or scientist. I really do not think that I need to know, plot and understand the dynamics of a transmitter’s components. Why are the ins and outs of transistors, resistors, capacitors and circuits so important to enable an operator to work the airwaves cleanly and properly?
The fact is that they are not so.
I learned as much as I was able to by achieving Intermediate status and while there obviously has to be rules to abide by to use the frequencies, the present system of qualification belongs to the past.
In the several years that I have been involved in the hobby I have come to realise that most of the operators who spend time talking about components, physics and the minutae of propogation belong to a certain age demographic, who had to make and mend their kit themselves.
Surely, the hobby needs to embrace more modern techniques of teaching and imparting relevant information regarding airwaves etiquette, behaviour and understanding rather than sitting down for an hour at an examination with one’s head bursting with baffling mathametical equations, repeating parrot-fashion descriptions and then forgetting almost everything as one re-enters the real world.
Either the hobby re-aligns itself with 2026 expectations or it will just fade away because of dinosaur thinking within the radio fraternity of rule-makers and diehard, blinkered Colonel Blimps.