noway2;n87590 said:
Still, I'm sorry to see that it's apparently left you bitter enough to wish I'll upon the ham radio community because of the actions of a few tools.
I don't wish you ill, I've just seen this play out before.
Back in the 80s there was a huge historical wargaming community, tons of companies, many conventions etc. The userbase often was very dismissive of newcomers who didn't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the battles, didn't have absolutely top shelf minis, wanted to try simpler less technical rules systems and time periods and things not currently popular. Well take a gander at it now.
There's a massively diminished community, mostly older folks and much older folks. The new tech made smaller companies able to release products, but the brick and mortar stores to sell them and where you played died or changed inventory to newer systems, especially the welcoming (but expensive) Games Workshop products. The historical stuff is a niche populated mostly by older guys who've been playing forever and a very occasional young apprentice, a lot of whom quit after they get tired of eating s*** for not knowing everything. New people and young people moved on to Warhammer, Infiniti etc. and more recently the collectible minis games. The space at conventions for historical wargaming went from entire conventions to a couple of tables in the back with the same three our four older guys pushing tin around, until they too stopped attending, often because they had passed on. Then that space went to something else because historical minis was not popular or relevant enough to justify saving space for it.
I've given away four or five large storage bins (hundreds of dollars worth) of historical minis stuff in my last pre-move purge because U've been hauling it around since the divorce and there really isn't anyone to play with anymore. No active local groups, no game stores hosting historicals (the last one near where I was living went out of business even after it "pandered" to the new userbase, because it was too little, too late), it had become nothing more than a collecting game because most of the guys I did historicals with in the US died or have too many health issues to play/paint anymore. Literally died. All those bins went to one guy, because he is the last guy I know still into it and still holds hope of finding a game or two.
I honestly see the exact same attitudes and arguments right here in this thread. I wish you no ill, but I will not be surprised to see the bandwidth auctions come when there aren't enough HAMs to matter politically and the government goes in search of more quick cash in a market greedy as hell for more bandwidth and willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for it.
Now, I am going to leave y'all to it, I shan't be back in this discussion.