[CQ-Contest] Average ages of contesters...

[Robert Chudek - KØRC]

The JARTS RTTY Contest exchange includes the operator age. The question come up on one of the reflectors regarding the apparent aging of the contest community. I took my 616 QSO log and ran it through YAES (Yet Another Excel Spreadsheet).

I removed the 00 and 99 entries and further stripped the log to eliminate duplicate callsigns. This left 412 contacts remaining to be analyzed.

Here are the average operator ages reported for countries with (5) or more unique callsigns in my JARTS RTTY log:

41.5   Brazil (6)
41.6   RA & UA calls (11)
48.8   Spain (8)
49.0   Argentina (5)
49.1   Italy (21)
52.2   Germany (6)
52.3   Japan (23)
56.4   France (8)
58.3   USA (209)
58.7  Canada (31)
68.1   G calls (9)
49.6   All others (74)

Running this process using data from the Top-50 logs would provide better statistics, but I think the trend is evident even in my small sampling. So what are Brazil and Russia doing that recruits enough younger operators to bias this report so heavily?

73 de Bob - KØRC in MN