Here are some interesting statistics taken from the JARL All-Asian
Contest web site - numbers of participants (CW and Phone logs
received) for the past few years:
Year JA EU NA
1996 457 270 34
1997 575 341 52
1998 647 385 62
1999 680 452 49
2000 859 431 63
2001 695 513 88
2002 733 469 98
2003 812 482 85
2004 696 533 79
2005 624 518 70
2006 727 521 57
Make of these figures what you like. Yes, I realise these are only
logs received and not numbers of all stations active, but I believe
it
shows that the more serious JA contesters are still active, at least
in contests where they "hold center stage". Maybe in the other
contests where they don't hold center stage, such as the CQ type
contests, some of these more JA serious contesters and many casual JA
contesters really did get bored with being "cannon fodder".
I reckon the JA's would really appreciate it, if a lot more non-Asian
stations especially from NA, participated in the next AA contest and
took a turn at being the cannon fodder :-)
73, Frank ZL2BR
>
> One hypothesis put forth is that the JAs got bored with being
> "cannon fodder" for the West Coast big guns. Another theory is that
> as crowding the big JA cities got worse, fewer JAs could put up
> antennas for HF. Perhaps the lure of cell phones and computers
> pulled the JA techno-hobbyist away from ham radio. Take your pick.
>
> I doubt there is any easy fix for this, unless we can make HF ham
> radio attractive to these people again.
>
> For many years, we all waited for a huge explosion of BY hams as
> China became a more open society. That hasn't worked to any great
> extent either...
>
>
> 73,
>
> Dave/K8CC
>
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