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 hams” (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.