In article m, "Dee D. Flint"
writes:

Actually the biggest problem is lack of activity by the current hams.

Agreed!

If we
take the figure of 600,000+ hams and calculate the number of QSOs per day if
each one had one QSO per YEAR (assume it takes two hams for a qso), thats
300,000 exchanges per year or nearly 1000 per day. That would keep the
bands pretty busy.

Whoa, hold on a sec, Dee.

Let's look at that 1000 QSOs/day. Say a QSO lasts a half-hour on average -
that's 500 QSO-hours per day. Or, to put it another way, there would be about
21 QSOs going on at any one time.

Now if we just consider the bands 160 through 70 cm., we have 13 bands. Might
work out to one QSO on each HF/MF band and three QSOs each on 6, 2, 222 and 70
cm. Hardly enough to keep the bands pretty busy!

If you meant to say "one QSO per DAY", then things are much different.

But instead we hear the same people over and over on the
VHF and HF frequencies. We have 150 members or so in our club and I only
hear about a dozen on the repeater regularly. It's the same dozen that do
VHF simplex and SSB. We need to get those already licensed more involved.

Agreed!

73 de Jim, N2EY