[CQ-Contest] Who buys ham gear?

[Pete Smith]

At 02:00 AM 1/12/02 -0600, Dale L Martin wrote:

>I wouldn't be too quick to put down the 'shack on a belt' group.  They may
>very well be what keeps the manufacturers interested enough in producing
>radios for the ham market to even produce HF radios.
>
>Someone mentioned there being 10k contesters and somewhere around 600k other
>hams ...

Seems to me the rest of the analysis is suspect because Dale's assuming
that all of those 600-700,000 non-contesters are active, and have bought
anything more than one 5-year-old handi.  My suspicion (and I'd like to see
some good numbers on this) is that contesters and DXers make up quite a
high percentage of those license-holders who are actually on the air.  This
is why I challenged Mark to release the questions and results of their
polling, so we could see what ARRL thinks they know.  

Does anyone else remember, 20 years ago or so, when ARRL did some really
comprehensive polling to characterize and understand the ham population?
Maybe it's time they did that again, and let us see the results.

Also, if the active HF ops were of such trivial importance to the overall
market, do you think we'd have Mark 5s and IC-756 Pro IIs?  If we really
produced less than 10 percent of their revenues, would the manufacturers
bother?

73, Pete N4ZR

The revised World Contest 
Station Database
is online at www.pvrc.org


--
CQ-Contest on WWW: http://lists.contesting.com/_cq-contest/
Administrative requests: cq-contest-REQUEST at contesting.com