"Alun L. Palmer" wrote in message
. ..

I'd say we will get more Generals, including some who are new hams, and a
few new Techs. There are definitely some Techs who are no longer active
due
to cellphones, but as long as they remain licenced it doesn't affect the
question.

There is definitely a problem in that you can no longer get test manuals
in
Radio Shack, or in any other store AFAIK. I tried to buy a General book
for
my XYL yesterday, but couldn't.

My vote is 2-6% increase.

73 de N3KIP

I've added your guess to the list.

I hope that your prediction is correct. But since the non-hams I have
talked to about ham radio don't know what the requirements for a license
are, they are not apt to jump into ham radio because the code test was
dropped. Most of them glaze over at the mention of a license and we never
even get to the requirements.

I expect that most of the active Techs will upgrade to General or even
Extra. Beyond that, I don't expect to see much change.

Over the long haul, I don't expect much change. Compared to other
countries, we actually have a fairly high percentage of people who have ham
licenses. Other than Japan, most countries have around 0.1% (or less) of
their population licensed. We have about 0.2% which puts us very high on
the list. I would expect our ham population numbers to stabilize but
wouldn't make any guesses as to what that number will be.

I'd really like to use a longer baseline for this pool but I don't think
very many of us are really up for a 5 or 10 year pool.

Dee, N8UZE