Dear fellow contesters,
A number of discussions both on and off this reflector have prompted
me to consider a number of questions. As contesters, who are we? How
old are we? Where do we live? What class of license do we hold? How
has this changed over time? As a group are we getting older or are new
hams joining our ranks at a rate high enough to sustain our hobby? How
has the ham population at large changed over time? How do we compare to
the at large population and in what ways are we the same or different?
How do we compare against the demographics of the (non-ham) population
as a whole? How has that changed over time?
Anecdotal evidence such as reduced advertising pages, the size of the
silent key column in QST, or a simple visit to Visalia or Dayton
indicate
that our hobby has evolved in my lifetime from a fun hobby in high
school
in the sixties to a retirement hobby for the AARP crowd. This project
will attempt to quantify these changes in who we are. Armed with these
quantified trends we can then prompt the discussion - is there a real
problem? If so, what actions are necessary to change the trend that will
produce measureable results?
Because the FCC callsign database contains as matter of public record
information such as date of birth with annual updates that provide a
record of change in machine readable form, this study will (at this
time)
confine itself to the US domestic arena. Likewise, because databases
such as the MASTER.DTA supercheck partial file are for primarily HF
contests we will confine the study to the HF contester. A future study
will examine the VHF contesting world. Public callsign databases with
sufficient information may be available from other countries with large
ham populations - perhaps someone on the reflector could supply some of
this historical data.
To accomplish this study we will examine large contest logs and
MASTER.DTA
databases over the last 10 years (or for as far back as we can get
machine readable data) and compare the domestic calls against the FCC
database for that year. We will also generate the same data for the
entire
ham call database. A (non-ham) programmer has been retained to generate
the code to convert FCC data and CT files into an Access database and
then
to create the Access code to process this data. A Maplynx geographic
plotting
program will be used visually display some of the data. Multi-operator
entries will be assigned, when known, a birth date averaging that of the
operators for that contest.
Results will be published on my foundation web site: www.jcdowning.org.
Your comments and suggestions are welcome. Please don't email logs or
other
files at this time. I will provide a special location for their email
or FTP
when I am ready to accept them.
best to all,
John Downing W2NA
--
CQ-Contest on WWW: http://www.contesting.com/_cq-contest/
Administrative requests: cq-contest-REQUEST@contesting.com
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