As a followup to my previous message "The Greying of Morse", I wondered if
there were any trends available from my old logs. Since I have Cabrillo logs
available for the past 5 seasons of Sweepstakes, I did a quick Excel evaluation
looking at the "newcomer" trend of the Sweepstakes contest. The total data
population is right at 10,000 QSO's, so should be reasonably "statistically
relevant".
The numbers below show the percentage of my QSO's which had a recieved "check"
in the current and 10 previous years (i.e., this year I counted "95" thru "05",
last year "94" through "04", etc.)
(Tabular info best viewed in 'fixed width' font)
Year CW% Phone% Combined%
2001 7.4% 24.0% 17.5%
2002 6.9 18.8 13.5
2003 7.0 14.8 10.9
2004 4.5 14.0 8.7
2005 4.0 14.0 9.9
While it probably is no surprise that newcomer contesters are more likely to be
on phone, the really scary part is that the overall percentages (regardless of
mode) in the "licensed-in-the-last-10-years" are dropping so dramatically.
If the trend of "newcomers active in contesting" is a representative subset of
"newcomers active on the air in general" (as I suspect it is) then the future
of our hobby has a rather disturbing look.
73, de Hans, K0HB
--
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~k0hb
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