On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 03:30:43 GMT, "Dee D. Flint"
wrote:


"Leo" wrote in message
.. .
On 11 Feb 2004 00:00:18 GMT, (N2EY) wrote:

In article , Leo

writes:

Except for Japanese 4th class licensees, how many hams are there in the
rest of
the planet?

Well, my trusty EuroCall 2003 CD lists 276,446 callsigns in Europe
alone - even if a couple of guys died, there's probably more than that
now. I don't have figures for Asia, Africa, Oceania or the rest of
the Americas (except that there's around 56,000 or so up here...).

Quite a few, anyway! DX wouldn't be the same without 'em.....


Excluding Japan, the last time I checked the Radio Amateur Call book listed
about 600,000+ for the combined rest of the world. Roughly equal to the
number of US Amateurs.

Sounds about right. (Japan has 1,000,000 hams? That explains the
number of Japanese amateur products out there - they built their own
user base for 'em!).

However, voting rights in the ITU, CCITT or other global entities
aren't weighted entirely upon the number of licensees or service users
that each country has. If they were, the US could control the ITU like
a corporation - claim a 51% user share and set global amateur policy
on their own votes alone. Fortunately, it doesn't work that way

Agreed that the US is obviously a major player - but I'm sure that
even if they had gone their own way, the rest of the world would not
necessarily follow. The role of agencies like the ITU is to
coordinate global resources so as to prevent chaos on the bands - not
to act as an agent of US policy.


Dee D. Flint, N8UZE

73, Leo