To follow up on Rick's comments about his SS CW experience, I've attached a graph showing age 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 . :) Itâs 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:
1940âs 6% 1950âs 17% 1960âs 39% 1970âs 22% 1980âs 4% 1990âs 6% 2000âs 4% 2010âs 2%
From these numbers, you can see there was a noticeable lack of newer hams that I worked. Perhaps you could say the ânew generationâ ham doesnât like contests. Possibly. Or, maybe you could go so far as to say these numbers indicate that we canât attract the âyounger hamsâ (if you assume that newer licensed hams are younger in age than some of those licensed in the 50-60-70âs). 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 (1940-70âs) and it appeared that the ânew generationâ was noticeable absent.
Think about that. Whereâs our next generation of hams? Thank about how those numbers will look when a lot of those older hams die? Whereâs the generation behind them? OK, again, maybe they arenât contesters, but then where are they? What are they doing? Well, 51% of hams are Technicians which might tell us something.
Things change. I donât 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 _______________________________________________ arrl-odv mailing list arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org https://reflector.arrl.org/mailman/listinfo/arrl-odv
===== e-mail: k1ki@arrl.org ARRL New England Division Director http://www.arrl.org/ Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box J, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444