146 From: John Smith I - view profile
Date: Tues, Jan 2 2007 6:15 am
Email: JohnFrom: John Smith I on Tues, Jan 2 2007 6:15 am

sapper wrote:
I am familiar with the saying "figures don't lie,but liers can
figure.And I can believe what
you say about the unemployment figures being suspicious. The pols
certainly have plenty to gain by keeping those figures low. But what
would be the point of skewing the amateur
statistics. I don't understand what the payoff would be to manipulate
them on purpose.
I admit when talking about numbers and stats I tend to have bouts of
dumb attacks.
73
KC9IRR

Sorry about that. Didn't mean for my paranoia to be catching ...

Double-checking the government isn't "paranoia." It's
just a means for concerned citizens to be alert and
aware. Most citizens don't give a damn as long as they can
gripe and moan about "the government" doing nasty; few of
those ever try to DO anything to make it "good."

I am just looking about for means to double check these figures.
Supposed to work that way, I think, we should be looking over the gov'ts
shoulder--just to keep 'em honest, mind you!

Anyone can freely access the FCC amateur radio databases over
the Internet. There are two flavors: Weekly and Daily. The
weekly Zip files are found at:

http://wireless.fcc.gov/uls/data/complete/l-amat.zip

Note: If it were capitalized, the file would be "L-AMAT.ZIP"

Beware on SIZE. In checking today (2 Jan 07), the weekly
file for 31 Dec 06 was 80.1 MB in size! The weekly
Applications file for 1 Jan 07 was 87.7 MB. If you have
only dial-up service it will take hours at 56K rate.
One needs DSL or faster to save time.

The records fields are explained by the FCC for delimiters
and content and abbreviations. To make a searchable text
file suitable for sorting is a fairly easy programming
task even for beginning computer programmers.

The reason why they would skew figures? I really can't point a finger
at anything.

Not a problem for me. :-) Case in point for amateur
radio is Joseph Speroni, AH0A, an obvious pro-code
proponent. Speroni boosts the use of "CW" on his
website www.ah0a.org and allows free download of a code
cognition training program, "Morse Academy."

Speroni's "statistics" have always been slanted to
showing code testing in the best possible light and
downgrading the no-code-test class. That happened on
the release of NPRM 98-143 regarding amateur radio
restructuring. A search of FCC Petitions and Comments
for same will show that Speroni has made several
Petitions and many comments to retain the code test,
all of the Petitions eventually rejected by the FCC
in following Reports and Orders.

At this point, be aware that Miccolis will be
champing at the bit in regards to the Speroni
description above. He will - undoubtedly - be writing
"that is plain and simply wrong" even though the
observations I gave are quite obvious to any reader.

A more honest set of statistics is provided by
www.hamdata.com which apparently has no preconceived
bias or mode favoritism. Maybe.

Like I say, I remember when YOU COULD trust your gov't, times have
changed ...

Ahhhh...in seeing all kinds of "statistics" put out
by everyone from non-government individuals to market
companies over the last 50 years, I'll put the onus
on not trusting the non-government statistics. One of
the more blatant stats compilers, Neilsen (on TV
viewership), is questionable based on their very low
sampling rate. However, those figures (bought and
paid for by broadcasters) don't seem to be questioned
in regards to new programs or cancellations of
programs. They don't have larger sample sizes for
more accurate figures because that increases their
cost and that reduces their profit margin. Neilsen
and their contemporaries are selling a PRODUCT (the
"statistics") and want to maximize ROI. Those TV
"stats" companies have managed to convince buyers
(and the general public) into believing they are
absolutely "honest" and "accurate." AS IF... :-)

Insofar as amateur radio data, the FCC ULS is pretty
complete and its not that hard to search individuals'
data. The only problem is the massive file size of
the single databases. Prior to the ULS the FCC had
smaller, regional databases which could, with lots of
time on-line, download at 2.4K rates.

Note: There are weekly and daily and quarterly data-
bases on over two dozen other radio services and
special radio service groups also available for free
(if one has high-rate connections).

Informationally yours,
LA