(One correction noted in bold)
To follow up on Rick's comments about his SS CW experience, I've attached
a graph showing
year first licensed for both
CW and Phone participants in the 2017 Sweepstakes. The data
points are from the callsigns found in all of the logs, not just those
who submitted logs.
The logs showed 2119 different callsigns on CW and 3858 on
Phone. The results article shows the number of actual
logs submitted was 1275 CW and 1688 phone. That really shows that
on CW there is a fairly limited pool of people to work that are casual
operators, while on Phone there is a significantly higher number of
stations available to work - and especially those licensed in the last
five years. More than anything, it seems to show that Phone
is alive and well with new hams while CW is not.
-- Tom
At 01:55 AM 11/15/2018, Roderick, Rick, K5UR via arrl-odv wrote:
Hi all:
I took some time and worked a few hours in the CW Sweepstakes contest a
couple of weekends ago. (I won that contest many years ago back in my
contest days, and even set a new record or two as I recall…. :) It’s a
fun contest.
As you may know, one of the exchanges in the SS contest includes the year
in which the operator was licensed. When I looked back at those I worked
and the years in which they were licensed, I saw some numbers that
concerned me. Specifically, it was a bunch of older licensed hams, and
what struck me was the lack of newer licensed hams. The numbers below
indicate the decade and percent worked:
1940’s – 6%
1950’s – 17%
1960’s – 39%
1970’s – 22%
1980’s – 4%
1990’s – 6%
2000’s – 4%
2010’s – 2%
From these numbers, you can see there was a noticeable lack of newer
hams that I worked. Perhaps you could say the “new generation†ham
doesn’t like contests. Possibly. Or, maybe you could go so far as to
say these numbers indicate that we can’t attract the “younger hamsâ€
(if you assume that newer licensed hams are younger in age than some of
those licensed in the 50-60-70’s). Possibly. But either way, it
concerned me. I realize that statistically this is probably not a valid
sampling, but it was interesting to look at the numbers. Nonetheless, 84%
of those I worked were hams from years ago (1940-70’s) and it appeared
that the “new generation†was noticeable absent.
Think about that. Where’s our next generation of hams? Thank about how
those numbers will look when a lot of those older hams die? Where’s the
generation behind them? OK, again, maybe they aren’t contesters, but
then where are they? What are they doing? Well, 51% of hams are
Technicians which might tell us something.
Things change. I don’t think a similar distribution would have occurred
back when I was working SS in my contest days. Maybe this is another
wakeup call about how the landscape of what we look like has changed from
my earlier days.
Just some food for thought.
73
Rick – K5UR
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