Is Amateur Radio Growing in the U.S.A.?
Ralph Wallio, WØRPK WØRPK at netINS.net
Thank you, Joe Speroni, AHØA!
Joe Speroni,
AHØA, is providing a very important volunteer service to our Amateur Radio
community. His web pages starting at http://ah0a.org/FCC/index.html
contain a wealth of Amateur Radio licensing statistics continuously gleaned
from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) license database. Joe's
statistics such as TOTAL LICENSES, NEW LICENSES, RENEWED LICENSES and EXPIRED
LICENSES are kept up-to-date for our review and analysis.
Joe includes a section titled, "Is Amateur Radio Growing in the U.S.A.?",
where he offers this discussion:
"The short answer is yes, the raw numbers are increasing. But they don't tell the whole story. Since a license is granted for 10 years, many of those who have long ago dropped out are still included as active amateurs. The current Technician class licenses were only issued beginning in March 1991. None of those "inactive" licenses will expire until March 2001 (just next year). Looking at the raw numbers suggests that the Technician class license is growing faster than all the others. It never decreases, so one might assume that the greatest percentage of amateurs will soon be Technicians. Nothing could be further from the truth!
To try to get a handle on the actual growth rate, we took the entire FCC database and computed the average time to expiration for all classes of unexpired licenses. If the number of new amateurs being added every month (through renewal, upgrade, or as new amateurs) were equal to those expiring, the average time to expiration should remain the same. Assuming that the distribution of the times to expiration was constant over the future 120 months, the expected value would be 60 months.
A number less than 60 months would mean that the class of licensees is decreasing. Looking at the Chart 1 you can see this is the case for Novice, Technician, and Technician Plus licensees.
In Oct 2000, the average life of licenses for the entire Amateur population will drop below 60 months. Within a year the number of U.S. Amateurs will begin to decline.
But it is important to state that this says little about the health of the Amateur Radio Service. Activity on the bands, level of technology, experimentation, education, and emergency preparedness are just a few of the important factors demonstrating the real health of the Amateur Radio Service."
Joe then
continues with an important continuously updated table of statistics,
"Average Life of Licenses by Class", found at http://ah0a.org/FCC/LifeAverage.htm . These statistics, Average Months to Expiration by
license class and month going back to August, 1999, tell a disturbing story
about the health and future of Amateur Radio. This is a very valuable analysis
of hundreds of thousands of licensing data points.
I find it helpful to view these statistics as EXCEL charts and update them with
Joe's new statistics as he makes them available. Joe's tabular analysis of
Remaining Life (solid graph lines scaled to the right) and License Counts
(dashed graph lines scaled to the left) is imported to EXCEL and then graphed
and annotated. Remaining Life values above 60 months indicate growth whereas
values below 60 months indicate shrinking. Slope of graph lines indicates rates
of growth or shrinking. As examples, our Novice Class is shrinking
significantly as expected; our Extra Class is growing but at a steadily
declining rate.
(Colors used for individual license classes are the same for both RL and LC.)
Two important event markers are included, 15-Apr-00, when our Amateur Radio
licensing scheme was substantially restructured (note brief changes in Extra
and General trends) and 15-Feb-01, the 10th anniversary of No Code Tech
licensing (note the reversed Tech trend due to No Code Tech licenses being
renewed for the first time)
Average age of licensed Hams is approaching 60
years as these trends in License Counts and Remaining Life continue. These
trends lead me to believe our hobby of Amateur Radio will suffer from severe
problems unless there is a major change in our ability to recruit, educate, license
and sustain activity of new young Hams.