[UK-CONTEST] Oldies

[Dave Lawley]

I'm afraid I thought I had better cross-post this from the cq-contest 
reflector. I certainly don't regard RTTY as *real* contesting on a par 
with SSB and CW but it is depressing that Gs come out as the oldest 
operators by a very wide margin.

I suppose in this overcrowded country with the planner's attitude to any 
antenna bigger than a rubber duck, you may well have to wait until 
you're 68 to be able to afford a place in the country where you can put 
up antennas capable of working W0 at the bottom of the cycle.

Cray Valley RS is doing what it can to encourage younger contesters - I 
hope all other groups in the UK take the position seriously and are also 
training the next generation of contesters.

Dave G4BUO

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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 03:39:41 -0500
From: Robert Chudek - K0RC <k0rc at citlink.net>
Subject: [CQ-Contest] Average ages of contesters...

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 - K0RC in MN