Zero Retries 0150
2024-05-03 — 1600 Subscribers!, Why I’m Not Worried that MFJ Winding Down Presages a Downturn in Amateur Radio, John Hays K7VE Transitions to Silent Keyboard, John Hays K7VE SK
Zero Retries is an independent newsletter promoting technological innovation that is occurring in Amateur Radio, and Amateur Radio as (literally) a license to experiment with and learn about radio technology. Now in its third year of publication, with 1500+ 1600+ subscribers.
About Zero Retries
Steve Stroh N8GNJ, Editor
Jack Stroh, Late Night Assistant Editor Emeritus
In this issue:
Web version of this issue - https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0150
Request To Send
Commentary by Editor Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Zero Retries 0150 and Zero Retries Hits 1600 Subscribers!
There have now been more than 150 “named” issues of Zero Retries, including one memorable issue that I broke into three issues published simultaneously, but this is a nice milestone - 150+ issues, weekly without break.
The cadence of subscribership growth of Zero Retries seems to be accelerating. Zero Retries’s subscriber count hit 1500 as of Zero Retries 0146 on 2024-04-05 and scarcely a month later, 1600 subscribers! Other than a minor increase from my LinuxFest Northwest 2024 talk this past weekend, I haven’t seen any specific mention that caused an increase of subscriptions.
On Mastodon, I noticed that I hadn’t updated the subscriber count in my blurb. I went to fix that and noted that there are an additional 260 followers there, and pretty much by definition they’re following to know about new issues of Zero Retries since that’s (almost) all I post there.
And, amusingly, Substack notified me that three other Substack newsletters have begun recommending Zero Retries - one about Artificial Intelligence, one about music, and another about investing. I checked them out briefly, and couldn’t see any overlap between their subject matter and Zero Retries.
Thus I conclude that this is “gaming” of some kind within the Substack ecosystem, and it’s symptomatic that Zero Retries is no longer a good fit for continuing to use Substack to publish Zero Retries.
For the benefit of newer subscribers, Zero Retries was begun solely out of frustration that despite so much technological innovation occurring in Amateur Radio, there was no one place to know about it / read about it. Such stories were only mentioned very occasionally in the “mainstream” Amateur Radio media. Eventually that frustration boiled over into starting Zero Retries. At that time, I could imagine that Zero Retries might, conceivably, achieve 500 subscribers - that would have been fantastic. 1000 subscribers was “oh… my…”. Then the 1500 subscriber milestone ticked by and there are now a handful of new subscribers each week.
Thank you Zero Retries email subscribers, RSS followers, Substack followers, Mastodon followers, Bluesky followers, and all of you Zero Retries readers. If there were few readers, Zero Retries wouldn’t be worth continuing to publish at this pace. You readers make this investment in time, work, and sacrifice of other fun, personal projects worthwhile.
As always, my sincere thanks to all the Founding Members and Paid Subscribers who are helping keep Zero Retries going by offsetting some of the expenses incurred with Zero Retries. I plan to publish mention of all financial contributors annually on the (July) anniversary issue.
Major Conference Countdowns
- Hamvention 2024 in Xenia, Ohio, USA on 2024-05-17 thru 19, in 02 weeks!
- HAM RADIO 2024 in Friedrichshafen, Germany on 2024-06-28 thru 30, in 05 weeks!
- JARL Ham Fair 2024 in Tokyo, Japan on 2024-08-24 and 25, in 16 weeks!
See other events at the Zero Retries Guide to Zero Retries Interesting Conferences.
Presentation at LinuxFest Northwest 2024
My presentation at LinuxFest Northwest 2024 - Amateur Radio and Open Source (Not Just Linux) went well overall. The slide deck was too long (50+ slides), was almost entirely text (and too much text per slide), and it had a lot of extraneous mentions that weren’t really on-topic discussing Open Source activities within Amateur Radio.
That said, presenting at LinuxFest Northwest 2024 was a nice “beta” for future presentations in which I will be “evangelizing” Amateur Radio to techies as a fun, interesting, and useful (in technical careers) activity. As I mentioned this presentation to a few others this week, I received some good feedback that I’ll be incorporating into the presentation. One comment was “well… some people just want to get into Amateur Radio for the fun of it, including using Morse Code”. The implication that I took from that comment was “Do you think only techies are suitable for Amateur Radio?”. No, that’s not my perspective, which is that there are many others such as my former ARDC colleague (and now an ARDC director) Bob Witte K0NR, who can make the case that Amateur Radio is a fun, interesting hobby and activity for many folks (who aren’t necessarily techies). But I feel qualified, from my background, and Zero Retries, to promote Amateur Radio to techies.
The most recent post by K0NR discussed that “Digital Modes” activity were the third most popular activity in a survey of Canadian Amateur Radio Operators, superseded only by “Casual Operating” and “Traditional Voice Modes (SSB / AM / FM)”. That validates my perspective that “digital modes” are worth promoting to techies. Again, I’m not positing that the Zero Retries Perspective - promote Amateur Radio “techie” modes, to techies who might become interested in Amateur Radio, as the only path to grow Amateur Radio. But doing so is “a” path that I can personally, and somewhat uniquely, contribute to. Here is the video of my presentation on YouTube:
