"N2EY" wrote in message
...
In article , GMC
writes:

It looks like we are on the road to some deflation in the numbers.

Perhaps. There are lots of factors influencing the numbers right now. For
example, a new Tech Q&A pool was put in place July 15, and since then the
number of new Techs has plummeted.

AE4FA has posted numbers gleaned from his research into the FCC
database concerning renewals of the Technician class (no code variety)
and has found that almost 97% of them are not renewing.

I question his methods.

There is only
a small data window to draw from however, as the first people who held
this license class are only starting to reach the end of the grace
periods. He had a way to filter out licensees who had upgraded.

Before I'd accept such a low renewal rate, I'd like to see how the data
was
processed. There are all sorts of procedural pitfalls in trying to figure
out
renewal rates. For example, people change their names and addresses
frequently,
making tracking difficult. The 1994 changes to the vanity callsign rules
resulted in a lot of Techs getting vanity calls - which carry with them a
renewal.


I did some exploring around in the FCC database and it appears that there is
a way to determine these things. When a person changes call signs or
upgrades and so on, the old one is marked as "terminated" not "expired".
The term "expired" appears to be used only when a person has neither renewed
nor upgraded. This is based on checking the call signs of persons that I
know upgraded. Changing a name or address does not result in either an
"expired" or "terminated" on the call sign. So if one uses the the feature
so search on the Amateur Radio Service rather than the basic search and
types in dates and checks "expired" and specifies the license class, you
should get those and only those that were not renewed. The numbers are
indeed rather large. Note however, it isn't marked as "expired" until the
two year grace period has elapsed from what I can determine by exploring the
data base.

So using the time period 10/18/2000 through 10/18/2001, here are the number
of expired licenses that pop up.

Novice - 5645 expired in that one year time frame
Tech - 3811 expirations
Tech+ - 3687 expirations

This is a total loss of 13,143 of licensees in the year from 10/18/2000 to
10/18/2001.

On the other hand it does not appear possible to determine the actual number
of truly new licenses from the data base as far as I can tell at this time.
You can select "Grant date" but that gives you all newly issued licenses and
updated licenses (i.e. renewals, adress changes, etc).

Dee D. Flint, N8UZE