Friday, March 12, 2021

IRTS membership jumps 7.4% in 2020


The Irish Radio Transmitters Society (IRTS) is the national society for radio amateurs in Ireland and in the year 2020, they recorded an impressive 7.4% growth in membership. The IRTS membership numbers from the years 2000 to 2020 are shown above and as can be seen, the society is now just short of 1000 members.

The current surge in membership is attributed in no small part to the new IRTS initiative in holding free online training courses for IRTS members for the amateur radio examination. This has resulted in a large number of people joining the society and hopefully after lot of them pass the HAREC examination in the months ahead, we'll see plenty of new EI callsigns on the bands. 

The new IRTS online training courses are a welcome development and are long overdue. The old format of holding physical classes in one location with a very limited catchment area just wasn't working.

Applications are still being accepted for the next HAREC on-line course starting on March 30th 2021. The course will run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for 8 weeks. The course is free for IRTS members and intending members and the closing date for applications is March 20th. Send expressions of interest to harectraining /at/ gmail.com.

The IRTS website can be found at https://www.irts.ie/

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