This may be hard to quantify, Jim, but is there any data or even
educated guessing about how many Novices are still actually active?



One could listen around the various novice subbands and copy down
callsigns, and
then go to qrz.com and look them up to get an idea of the precentage of
novices vs
other licenses active.

Another question would be how soon a new novice who gets into it
upgrades vs novices that never upgraded. Since no new novice licenses
have been issued in the last few years, it seems likely that anyone still
a novice likely lost interest in ham radio and thus inactive. But if
many renewals
of novice licenses are happening, then that's not a valid reasoning.....