Where did all the amateurs go?

Foundations of Amateur Radio

There is a recurring topic in Amateur Radio circles, called "permissions", or "rights", or some other word indicating "entitlement". It's a conversation that has been happening since the dawn of radio experimentation and will continue until well after our Sun has burped it's final sun-spot.

In Australia, there are three classes of License, in increasing level of responsibility they are Foundation, Standard and Advanced. There is an ongoing tension between these categories. Some higher level responsible licensees look down on the class with less responsibility, and the reverse is also true.

This separation of class is an evolutionary one. As I said recently, the most recent overhaul, more than 10 years ago, back in 2005 saw the introduction of the Foundation Class and the consolidation of various classes into Standard and Advanced.

There are current noises being made about how this needs to change. There are those who suggest that the Foundation Class needs to have access to more power, to more bands, to more modes and various other suggestions. There are recurring noises of making the Foundation Class require a renewal and other such things. Often there is some link made to the growth of the hobby. Make it simpler so we can get more people, make it bigger so we get more people, make it harder so we get better people, make it ... something else.

I'm a computer geek. I like playing with data and I like to figure out how stuff works. Over a year ago I started the process of trying to understand how amateur radio ebbs and flows. For example, in rough terms, in the 10 years that the Foundation Class of license has existed, we've issued about 10,000 new licenses, so around 1,000 a year, give or take.

In the same time, the total size of the amateur community has stayed pretty much the same.

So, did we loose all those Foundation entrants, did the old ones die off, did something else happen? Is a licensee who starts and stays for a year more or less likely to upgrade? Is there a time window when the likelihood of dropping out is increased? Is there some underlying factor that causes people to leave the community? Is there a correlation between on-air activity and longevity in the hobby? What about age, gender, etc. We simply don't have the analysis at this time.

I've been at the ACMA and the WIA to get access to historic data, frankly it's been a hard slog, the ACMA pointing at the WIA and the WIA claiming license restrictions and neither giving any indication that they're doing anything to resolve the issue. In case you're wondering, I'm talking about the public RADCOM, now called SPECTRA database, nothing secret or private about it.

I recently hit on the idea of using contest logs from the various contests to determine actual on-air activity. So that will add several gigabytes of data to my investigation. And an interesting side note - based on incomplete data, the 2015 CQWW Phone Contest saw the submission of 60 logs from Australia, but around 750 actual stations from VK were heard on-air. I'm attempting to get the same raw information from the local contests. This will give me a "Last Heard on Air" date, which will give me an indication of the status of the callsign involved.

So, regardless of where you stand on the notion of the amount of responsibility you have as a Licensed Amateur, it's clear to me that we need more information.

I think this is important for the future of our hobby and I'm working on it.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB