[CQ-Contest] Contesting Extinction

[Ev Tupis]

Paraphrasing Kenneth's post, "Using the number of log
submissions as the criteria, VHF Contesting is on the
decline, and HF Contesting is on the rise."

> So, I would be inclined to conclude the empircal
> evidence shows that contesting overall is not in
> decline, and in fact DX contesting, and 
> expecially DX contesting on CW, has never been more
> popular than it is today.

In the USA, the Amateur Radio population is divided,
in a very lop-sided way:

Total licenses      : 655,194
Technician          : 320,499
All other Classes   : 334,695
Source: http://ah0a.org/FCC/Licenses.html

The increase in HF/CW contest log submissions is
coming from the 1/2 of the Amateur population that has
HF/CW priviledges.  The decrease in VHF contest log
submissions is coming from the other 1/2 of the
Amateur population.

Said another way, 1/2 of our population is submitting
more logs, while 1/2 of our population is submitting
fewer logs.  I am not certain that log submittal is
the gauge by which we should measure this discussion. 
Instead, maybe we, as a community, need to ask
ourselves, "Why is there such a disparity between the
two groups?"

Ev, W2EV


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