In article , "Dee D. Flint"
writes:

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".

Is this really the case? I thought an upgrade is considered a modification.
It's my understanding that an upgrade does not extend the license term, but a
vanity call does (to avoid having to prorate the vanity fee).

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.

Interesting stuff, Dee! I wonder how much of this was done by the "97%" folks.

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.

In those three license classes, anyway. But this info raises a question: If
your method only counts licenses which have reached the end of the grace period
without a renewal, then the expirations listed above are those for licenses
issued or renewed during the period 10/18/1998 to 10/18/1999. But that time
period is before the Tech/Tech Plus split!

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).

I think FCC makes that info available another way, because the AH0A site
carries a "new license" category. But it's based on current data, not historic
stuff.

Perhaps the best indicator is to watch how the total number of each license
class, and the combined Tech/Techplus total, rise and fall. For instance,
notice how slowly (percentagewise) the number of Advanceds is dropping,
compared to how fast the number of Novices is dropping. The number of Tech
Pluses is dropping fast too, but that's aided by the fact that FCC is renewing
all Tech Pluses as Techs.

73 de Jim, N2EY