Hi all: I took some time and worked a fewhours in the CW Sweepstakes contest a couple of weekends ago. (I won thatcontest many years ago back in my contest days, and even set a new record ortwo as I recall…. :) It’s a fun contest. As you may know, one of theexchanges 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 licensedhams, and what struck me was the lack of newer licensed hams. The numbers belowindicate 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 seethere was a noticeable lack of newer hams that I worked. Perhaps youcould say the “new generation” ham doesn’t like contests. Possibly. Or, maybeyou could go so far as to say these numbers indicate that we can’t attract the “younger hams”(if you assume that newer licensed hams are younger in age thansome of those licensed in the 50-60-70’s). Possibly. But either way, itconcerned me. I realize that statistically this is probably not a validsampling, but it was interesting to look at the numbers. Nonetheless, 84% ofthose 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 ournext generation of hams? Thank about how those numbers will look when a lot ofthose older hams die? Where’s the generation behind them? OK, again, maybe theyaren’t contesters, but then where are they? What are they doing? Well, 51% ofhams are Technicians which might tell us something. Things change. I don’t think asimilar distribution would have occurred back when I was working SS in mycontest days. Maybe this is another wakeup call about how the landscape of whatwe look like has changed from my earlier days. Just some food for thought. 73Rick – K5UR