Foundations of Amateur Radio

Around the world are thousands of associations, groups of people, clubs if you like, that represent radio amateurs. Some of those associations are anointed with a special status, that of "member society" or "peak body", which allows them to represent their country with their own governments and on the international stage to the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, through a global organisation, the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union.

Some of these are known across our whole community, the ARRL in the USA, the RSGB in the UK, and the WIA in Australia. Some much less so, the CRAC, the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club, or the ARSI, the Amateur Radio Society of India, for example.

In an attempt to get a deeper understanding of what distinguishes these organisations, I visited a dozen member society websites. Cultural sensibilities and aesthetics aside, the variety and sense of priority is both pleasing and astounding.

Starting close to home, the WIA, the Wireless Institute of Australia, shows news as the most important and the top story is a radio contact between the International Space Station and a school, held about two weeks ago.

The ERAU, the Estonian Radio Amateurs Association, features an article about the 2025 General Meeting outlining who was there, what was discussed and thanking the participants for their contributions.

When I visited, the ARRL, the American Radio Relay League, top news item, was the renewed defence of the 902-928 MHz Amateur Radio Band, from a few days ago. The most important issue for the ARRL is that you read the latest edition of QST magazine, but only if you're a member.

The RSGB, the Radio Society of Great Britain, has an odd landing page that links to the main site, which features much of the same content. The latest news is "Mental Health Awareness Week" and encourages us to celebrate kindness in our community.

The DARC, the German Amateur Radio Club, has a page full of announcements and the top one was an article about current solar activity including a coronal hole and various solar flares.

The ERASD, the Egyptian Radio Amateurs Society for Development, uses qsl.net as its main website. It features many images with text, presumably in Arabic, that unfortunately I was not able to translate. Curiously the landing page features some English text that welcomes all interested to join. I confess that I love the juxtaposition between a Yaesu FT-2000 transceiver and the images of Tutankhamun and the pyramids.

The RAC, the Radio Amateurs of Canada, use their homepage to promote its purpose, and features many pictures of their bi-monthly magazine, which you can only read if you're a member, which is where many of the homepage links seem to go.

The RCA, the Radio Club of Argentina, is promoting the 2024-2025 Railway Marathon, including links to descriptions of what constitutes a Railway Activation, how to reserve your station, and upcoming and past activations. There's also a reminder to renew your license.

The ARSI, the Amateur Radio Society of India, has a very sparse landing page showing their mission and not much else. Clicking around gives you lots of information about the history, activities, awards and the like. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find out how to become licensed in India. There's hardly any images.

In contrast, the URA, the Union of Radio Amateurs of Andorra, lands you on a page with contact details and not much else. Clicking through the site gives you lots of pictures of happy people and maps, lots of maps.

The KARL, the Korean Amateur Radio League, features an announcement with a link to the 24th Amateur Radio Direction Finding, from a week ago, but it requires a login to actually read it.

The JARL, the Japan Amateur Radio League, features an announcement to a form you can complete to join the "List of stations from which you do not wish to receive QSL cards."

The NZART, the New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters, features a big button to latest news and clicking on it shows the "Jock White Field Day", which was held several months ago.

I wasn't able to see the CRAC, the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club, since the page didn't load for me. The "Wayback machine", also known as archive.org, from a capture a few days ago, showed a news item announcing the intent to organise the 1st Class C Amateur Radio Technical "something", I say "something" because I cannot actually load the article and see what it has to say. The event was scheduled for a month ago, the announcement was from several months ago.

Content aside, finding sites was interesting too, mind you, there's plenty of member associations that don't have any web presence at all. Is that by choice, or necessity?

The IARU list of member societies conflicts with the list of national organisations shown on Wikipedia. The IARU has about 160 entries, I say about, since the list isn't really formatted as much as it's congealed. Let's just say, perhaps a table for tabular data might be a novel approach. Wikipedia is slightly better formatted, it lists 93 national organisations.

As it happens, both include a link to the national organisation for China, which is either the Chinese Radio Sports Association, with apparently two different acronyms, either CRSAOA, or CRSA, or if you believe the IARU as a source, it's the one I mentioned earlier, the CRAC. I don't know which one is right, but at least we can assume that the IARU page was updated formally, rather than edited by someone on the internet. Regardless of which one is the "real" Chinese national amateur radio organisation, none of the websites loaded for me.

Let's move on. It's interesting that several non-English sites like Korea, Japan and Germany feature a button that allows their site to be translated into English. What's even more interesting is that the English version of the site is not in any way the same content. In many cases it appears to be information relevant to English visitors rather than a translation. One notable exception is Estonia, which allows a visitor to read their site in Estonian or English right out of the box.

Unsurprisingly, the ARRL website has no buttons for Spanish, even though that represents about 13 percent of the USA population, let alone any other language.

I'd encourage you to visit a few and see what you can learn about the other members of our community around the world.

My visits leave me with questions.

What do these organisations stand for? What do they do? Are they there for amateurs, for aspirant members, the general public, for regulators, for their members, for fund raising and advertising, or international visitors and tourism?

It seems to me that looking at just a few of these organisations reveals a great many things about how they understand their own role and how they deliver service and just how much money they have to play with to make that happen.

I'll leave you to ponder how effective they might be and what your role is in that endeavour.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB