[CQ-Contest] JA's long time passing

[Tom Frenaye]

At 10:58 AM 3/1/2016, Larry/W6NWS wrote:
>It seemed like many of the JA's of the day were somewhat young.  I wonder if it is a case of outgrowing a toy and moving on to something else. There are probably many here in the US that have moved on to other things but with as many of us as there is it is not a noticeable. I haven't seen the numbers in many years but even at the height of the JA's I think there were less than 50K hams (number 2 population of hams in the world IIRC) and the US was around 500K.

50k is not close.

JA operator licenses are issued for a lifetime so it isn't a good way to know how many there really are.   The 2014 total is in the 3.5m range and growing at 22k per year.

JA station licenses are for five years and are a better indicator of the current number of has.  The 2014 data showed 436k station licenses.  2014 was the first year since 1995 where the total number of station licenses actually increased.  The peal in station licenses was in 1995 with 1.3m.

The boom in JA licenses was strongly influenced by their 4th Class license, which is an phone-only licence that does not include 20 meters.  They can run 10w on HF and 20w on VHF.
About 90% of JA operator licenses are in this category.    They totals seemed to dive not long after personal computers were common and especially when cell phones became widespread.

Their 3rd Class license offers 50w on all but 20m.   

Their 2nd Class license offers 200w on all bands

The 1st Class license seems to be similar to the US Extra Class and has a 1000w limit.


For more info, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_operator    (basic info)

http://ah0a.org/MPT/index.html    (multi-year detail of station and operator licenses)
    (in the table showing operator licenses, the columns under Operator Licenses are Class 1, 2, 3, 4 totals)

http://www.jarl.org/English/2_Outline/   (details on license classes, see attachments 1-2-3)

If you know more than I was able to dig out, please correct me!

   -- Tom


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