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September 12th 03, 01:19 PM

In article ,
(K0HB) writes:

I'm not defending (or attacking) their research, but given their
numbers I'm simply asking the obvious question "What can we do to
improve the retention rate?"

The first thing is to understand why folks drop out.

If, as some have speculated, a lot of folks became hams 10-12 years ago for
honeydo purposes, and now they have cell phones, there's not much we can do.

OTOH, if they're dropping out because of, say, the written tests being too
hard, we can petition FCC to fix that.

But first we need to know why. Some will say "the code test" in a knee-jerk
reaction - without any proof.

Even if they're off by a factor of 10
(23% reenlistment rate) we obviously ought to be examing this
troubling issue.

You're assuming that there is some credibility in their computations. I say
there is none. Suppose they are off by a factor of 40 - the renewal rate then
would be 92%.

(Of course, you can opt to blow it all off by
labeling it as BS, but that strikes me as a lazy cowards way out.)

Or you can take bad stats as gospel without examining their process.

They claim there were less than 2000 new Techs issued in 5 months. That does
not compute at all, given the numbers of new Techs issued over the past 5 years
or so (close to 2000 per month).

At the time of restructuring there were something like 200,000 Techs. That was
110 months after the Tech lost its code test, but before any of them expired.
Works out to an average of 1800 per month. And the renewal rate is a lot higher
than 23% per the AH0A site numbers. AH0A tells how his data is gathered.

It strikes me that calling it "a troubling issue" without knowing how the data
was gathered is simply not responsible.

73 de Jim, N2EY

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