On Apr 15, 9:11 am, John from Detroit wrote:
K6LHA wrote:
ARRL website address for their license "statistics" page is:
http://www.arrl.org/fcc-license-counts
As usual, they tabulate only those in their 10-year license term.
K6LHA
Well.. if your license has expired.. Then you are NOT currently licensed.
So that is how it should be tabulated
Depending on how and what the statistics are used for. If you are the
F.C.C., you have to count the grace period licenses. You might want to
separate them out, but the policy is that they don't reassign them for
two years. There's good reasons for that, how many of us have
forgotten to get our cars inspected once in a while. Any rate, they
aren't in the business of punishing a mistake with having to go
through the licensing process again.
When we keep a count, the important thing is that we are consistent.
Then we see trends, and to me, the trend is the important thing.
The trend is after the expected drop-off in the early years of this
century, (note 1) there was an increase in the number of Hams in
recent years. There was a shift in which a lot of Hams upgraded to
Extra. We also got a lot of new Hams via interest in emergency Ops.
These were largely, but not all, Technicians.
That's pretty much the trends I see.
note 1. The expected drop-off was most likely the result of a large
group of inactive Technicians declining to renew their licenses. This
was a group who were licensed in the early 1990's who used Ham radio
as a sort of communications line home to figure out if they needed to
stop off at the grocery store to get bread or pick up the kids after
soccer practice.
After the ascendency of Cell phones, these people by and large
migrated over to cells, because it served their purpose better. At
that point, they became inactive. When I first became a Ham in the
late 1990's, there were a few local Hams left who still did this. But
over the next couple years, they all disappeared. And at least in my
area, the Hams who didn't renew their Technician license were the ones
who used Ham radio for that purpose.
- 73 de Mike N3LI -