Just finished another annual running to the two-weekend Sweepstakes contest (one
weekend Morse, one weekend phone).

As many of you know, this contest simulates traffic handling protocols with a
modestly challenging exchange with 5 information elements exchanged in each
direction. One of those elements is a "check" which is a 2-digit number
indicating the year the station was first licensed.

(This doesn't have any direct connection to the age of the operator, but it does
tell you how long they've been licensed.)

During this years contest weekends I was struck by the higher incidence of
"recent checks" in the phone event as compared to the Morse event.

Since I have Cabrillo logs available for the past 5 seasons of Sweepstakes, I
did a quick Excel evaluation looking at the "newcomer" trend of the Sweepstakes
contest. The total data population is right at 10,000 QSO's, so should be
reasonably "statistically relevant".

My intent was to test my hunch about a higher tendency for recent licensees to
be on phone, and that hunch proved true (no particular surprise), but in
addition a much scarier trend rose out of the figures.

The numbers below show the percentage of my QSO's which had a recieved "check"
in the current and 10 previous years (i.e., this year I counted "95" thru "05",
last year "94" through "04", etc.)

(Tabular info best viewed in 'fixed width' font)

Year CW% Phone% Combined%

2001 7.4% 24.0% 17.5%
2002 6.9 18.8 13.5
2003 7.0 14.8 10.9
2004 4.5 14.0 8.7
2005 4.0 14.0 9.9

As I mentioned, it's no surprise that newcomer contesters are more likely to be
on phone, but the really scary part is that the overall percentages (regardless
of mode) in the "licensed-in-the-last-10-years" are dropping so dramatically,
almost halved in just 5 years.

If the trend of "newcomers active in contesting" is a representative subset of
"newcomers active on the air in general" (as I suspect it is) then the future of
our hobby has a rather disturbing look.

What are we (all of us) going to do to reverse this ominous trend?

--
73, de Hans, K0HB
--
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