Tom, thanks for the information. Interesting chart.  Well, it sure makes you stop and think about that bubble from about 1956-1980 on the CW totals and what will happen when that group starts to fall off into SK's. It's also noteworthy to see the difference in the phone totals. I suspect, to Rod's point, that if we could compare FT8 data in some way, that we might see an even further shift.   Yep, the landscape is changing.....  Thanks again, Tom. 73Rick - K5UR -----Original Message----- From: Rod Blocksome <rod.blocksome@gmail.com> To: Tom Frenaye K1KI <frenaye@pcnet.com> Cc: arrl-odv <arrl-odv@arrl.org> Sent: Mon, Nov 19, 2018 11:05 am Subject: [arrl-odv:27706] Re: SS Numbers (corrected) Some very interesting data Tom - Thanks for putting this together.I wonder what the graph would look like if there was an FT8 SS Contest?Perhaps there is a way (not too costly) to extract the year of license from call signs submitting FT8 QSOs into LoTW?Food for thought,Rod, K0DAS On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 10:25 AM Tom Frenaye <frenaye@pcnet.com> wrote: (One correction noted in bold) To follow up on Rick's comments about his SS CW experience, I've attacheda graph showing year first licensed for bothCW and Phone participants in the 2017 Sweepstakes.   The datapoints are from the callsigns found in all of the logs, not just thosewho submitted logs. The logs showed 2119 different callsigns on CW and 3858 onPhone.    The results article shows the number of actuallogs submitted was 1275 CW and 1688 phone.  That really shows thaton CW there is a fairly limited pool of people to work that are casualoperators, while on Phone there is a significantly higher number ofstations available to work - and especially those licensed in the lastfive years.   More than anything, it seems to show that Phoneis 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 acouple of weekends ago. (I won that contest many years ago back in mycontest days, and even set a new record or two as I recall…. :) It’s afun contest. As you may know, one of the exchanges in the SS contest includes the yearin which the operator was licensed. When I looked back at those I workedand the years in which they were licensed, I saw some numbers thatconcerned me. Specifically, it was a bunch of older licensed hams, andwhat 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 see there was a noticeable lack of newerhams that I worked. Perhaps you could say the “new generation†hamdoesn’t like contests. Possibly. Or, maybe you could go so far as tosay these numbers indicate that we can’t attract the “younger hams†(if you assume that newer licensed hams are younger in age than some ofthose 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%of those I worked were hams from years ago (1940-70’s) and it appearedthat the “new generation†was noticeable absent. Think about that. Where’s our next generation of hams? Thank about howthose numbers will look when a lot of those older hams die? Where’s thegeneration behind them? OK, again, maybe they aren’t contesters, butthen where are they? What are they doing? Well, 51% of hams areTechnicians which might tell us something. Things change. I don’t think a similar distribution would have occurredback when I was working SS in my contest days. Maybe this is anotherwakeup call about how the landscape of what we look like has changed frommy 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 DivisionDirector http://www.arrl.org/ Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box J, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone:860-668-5444 _______________________________________________ arrl-odv mailing list arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org https://reflector.arrl.org/mailman/listinfo/arrl-odv _______________________________________________ arrl-odv mailing list arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org https://reflector.arrl.org/mailman/listinfo/arrl-odv